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nevermindirah · 3 years

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Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

#palestinian liberation #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it #and yet #here we are #long post #mine #antisemitism #settler colonialism #racism #european imperialism #genocide cw

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struwwelzeter · 4 years

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Why do you think Richard would be a nightmare client please? And do you think Till would be one too?

Oh, because he’s hands down the person that goes «It doesn’t feel right, this is not what I asked for ☹️» and then can’t tell me why in a way that I can fix it.

So, I’m gonna elaborate on that because it does tie into the Zoran thing and I am in the mood to blab about my work. Sorry, this got long. I’m a graphic designer/art director, aka the person that makes logos and designs event posters and such. I mainly work in culture (museums/exhibitions) at the moment, but I have done a few record packagings in the past and musicians generally are the worst clients, followed only by painters/sculpturers/other artiststs. It’s understandable and not really their fault and they are precious babies that need to be protected at all costs, but oh man.

The thing is, someone who just poured their heart and soul and failed relationships and personal nightmares into a record for the past 5 years and now needs a cover for it has a completely different level of investment into how things should be than let’s say a dentist who needs a new logo. They often have a very, very strong idea about how things should be but can’t at all articulate it because it’s so deep set into their soul and if they could articulate it they wouldn’t be coming to me in the first place, they’d just do it themselves. We all know Richie is a little control freak that needs things to be just so, and that’s just a very tough crowd to please because a design school education doesn’t come with a manual on how to read minds, particularly ones that don’t even know what they want.

If someone like that comes to me, I know I’ll be working unpaid overtime. I’d always make sure to give him a few extra (small, like a changed font or different color) variants even if that’s not part of the agreed upon comission (usually I’d bill more the more variants I offer to choose from) to reassure him there’s still alot of options we haven’t tried yet and to make him feel in control and show that I’ll try whatever I can to make it right. I’d try to talk to him more than other clients and get him to talk about stuff he visually likes more to get an idea about what exactly he means if he says stuff like «I want it to look clean» because surprise, surprise, not everyone means the same when they say that they just think they do. I’d probably make more time for revisions because we’ll need them, I’d have him come over for an afternoon and work with him live, infront of my monitor to test different things and see what speaks to him.

This is broad generalisation, but: The thing is, if I have an investment banker come in and ask for all that extra service, I’d be able to bill every last second of that and the dude wouldn’t feel ripped off. With artists you can’t do that. They’re used to creativity being something you can’t measure that way, they’re used to work themselves with very little monetary compensation for what they do (even someone as successful as Richard feels that. There is interview evidence.) They will feel like things become morally compromised when every tiny little thing I do becomes a question of budget first. They’ll feel taken advantage off alot quicker. That’s why especially with clients like this, you respect budgets out of principle. Mainly because the average musician or photographer isn’t a multi platinum selling big shot, but also because they’re sensitive about it morally. Being a designer is weird because artist people will see you as one of them, and business people will too, and you better be able to wear both hats. In other words, with artists, as a general blanket statement, I’ll take alot more shit and a lot less pay to get to the end of it if I want the thing to work out. That’s the nightmare part because walking on eggshells isn’t fun.

The fun bit is the part where you manage to bring someone’s heart out in the open and make it visible. One of my first paied projects was an editorial piece for a fashion designer. It was everything I described above, but when we nailed it she sat crying next to my desk. You can’t measure that shit in money anyway. I remember Richard saying in an interview that the title A Million Degrees came up while he was working with the graphic designer on it, and that, that right there is what you’re shooting for. You’ll want to help someone express themselves. It’s beautiful, pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. AMD was designed by Dirk Rudolph, one of the indusyry greats and who’s worked with him for years. I’m not surprised it worked out that way.

The point is, offering creative work as a service takes a truckload of empathy. Nobody talks about this when you start art school, but it’s one of the most empathetic and human connection based professions out there if you want to do it really well. You need to know and understand who you’re working with. The job is to make somone elses vision look it’s absolute best and shine and speak to the people it’s intended to speak to in the way the creator has invisioned it. That’s a big, big ask. You’re always translating in languages only one person speaks.

The problem is, that most of the people who became creators are pushed into offering it as a service for monetary/capitalism reasons and they want their own ego in it too because they never signed up for this shit where you give up your own vision and make it all about someone elses. It sucks and it’s unfair, because someone like Zoran would be worlds better and happier if he could just do whatever he pleases. He can’t tho, because he’s selling a service, and someone who buys a service expects a service. And that’s the part that always leads to problems, unless the chemistry works out really well. It bothers me a little when I see it happen like that tho. Because he basically says «forget about what we agreed, here’s MY thing.» and that’s just ... I don’t know, it’s just very much against my own work ethic I guess.

As far as Till goes, I think he’s pretty excitable and easy to please because he’ll just enjoy seeing it come to life. I also think that with someone like Zoran who he considers a friend he’ll be “whatever” about money, because he can afford it and probably doesn’t feel it’s worth quarreling over. Freedom, etc. Lucky as hell landing a client like that.

#i love my work very very much #in case you weren’t able to tell #i need a ramble tag

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janiedean · 5 years

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Since we're in topic, do you have some advices for writers? Where do you begin when you write original stories and characters? The plot, the concept, the description of characters?

spewell considering that you’re talking to ‘oh hey I have the original idea that might work but I’ve been figuring it out for a whole year and a half’ take them with the necessary skepticism but since I did come up with some decent ocs in fic apparently my advice is probably not entirely shitty lol so with the premise that writing is Not A Science and other than reading a lot no advice is 100% foulproof especially if it doesn’t work for you...

I’d start with the concept, ie: what do you want your story to be about or what message do you want it to be about or what do you want to do with it. do you want to scare people? do you want to make people happy with quality entertainment but without writing a Serious Novel? do you want to write a sad thing to make a point? like, you need to know where you’re going with it in general;

when you have your concept, whichever it is - for one, without going in-depth let’s just say that my original novel concept that I’ve been trying to figure out for good is ‘blade runner meets high fidelity’ (don’t worry IT MAKES SENSE) -, you need to work at once both on main setting and protagonist. I mean, idk let’s just discuss a thing I wanted to write last year when I was thinking of sending original writing to this scifi anthology and then never managed because time and drama and real life happened and I couldn’t commit to it;

so, the theme of that anthology was ‘alternate peace’ ie write a short story where a situation that in history ended up in a fight/war/bloodbath is solved peacefully and write the alternate universe coming from it. so: I had to come up with the idea first because otherwise I wouldn’t have known where to start, then the worldbuilding, then the characters - ngl I think that if you have the worldbuild the characters come a lot easier but that’s me. so: I was like ‘what if I wrote something where the ludlow massacre never happens?’ (the ludlow massacre was tldr a strike in colorado which ended up with the strikers being mass killed by the national guard and in turned caused enough scandal to get unions/unionized labor a lot of traction in the US at least until maccarthysm.) then I didn’t, but in order I went like:a) if what happened is that it had repercussions on the history of unionized work in the US, if I did it so that the workers accepted a plea or smth and the rockfellers won without no one dying, those repercussions would Not Have Happened, nor it’d have created all the left-leaning literature/politics/thinking that came out of it, john reed wouldn’t have written about it etc, so I had elaborated an entire situation post-wwii where unions had all died long before, people were pretty much without any single social lifesaver and could get fired at will and it was basically dystopian hell with mccarthy being president or smth;b) at that point I was like, who do I put in this, and at that point I didn’t manage to go much forward but I had a feeling I should have some young person who was born after the not-massacre who had no idea of what went on talking to an older one that had actually been there and wished they hadn’t taken the deal;c) young dude would have been more or less cynical/not really much of a politics person, old dude would have been old school leftist who still wishes there could have been a better world and wishes the new generation would put two and two together and talk to their elders;d) young dude wouldn’t have known how to read/write because he wouldn’t have needed it for factory work, old dude would have etc;at that point I could have probably gone and gave them families (or not), or a friend (or not), and my general idea was having them discuss politics for the main part of the story, then old guy dies or smth like that and young guy actually gets the message and idk I basically wanted you to read it and feel like I felt when I listened to the ghost of tom joad, that was the general idea;that said, the characters were the last part i came up with because I needed the worldbuilding to know what character I wanted in it, which is why I’d say worldbuld first if you’re writing that kinda thing ie scifi, alternate history etc;

now, obv. if you’re writing the coffee shop au just in novel format or if you’re writing something lighter where the setting doesn’t matter, you need good characters first. I mean, if you write the coffee shop setting just to have a good love story you might want people to pick yours and not the umpteenth version of it with the same dynamic (same with the YAs with the sixteen year-old girl who thinks she’s ugly falling for the hot dude with abs and a bad attitude), so in that case I’d go for the characters. for one, if I had to write a YA, I’d make it with a girl who is actually ugly and has hobbies other than just reading and maybe plays in the school band or has some peculiar post-school job or idk can repair cars but is not good at everything she does and the guy would be moderately hot though not THE SPIT COPY OF DAMON SALVATORE JUST WITH GREEN EYES, he wouldn’t have a license and he wouldn’t think that it’s sexy to tell your girlfriend that you own her, and while I’m nowhere near interested in writing YAs, that would differentiate it from 99,9% of the YAs around from what I see, and so at that point I’d make sure I got the main two down and then I’d work on the friends and family and make them less stereotypical as possible so my YA is different from everyone else’s YA, and if any of them is a supernatural creature they suck at it and hate having supernatural magic and the likes. I mean, you want your characters to have a personality, but if you have a good worldbuilding behind them it might come after, if you don’t gaf about the worldbuilding and just want the standard setting work on the characters and try to give them depth before you plan anything else;

figure out where do you want your story to go before writing it - ie: the only reason I haven’t written the original yet is that idk what kind of spin I want the ending to have and I’m not 100% convinced so I’m not doing it yet, but if you don’t have the backbone of it planned then you’re going to lose steam or the plot will fuck you over (in my experience). like, try to have at least clear what happens in the main arc so that you know how to get from beginning to ending without needing to figure shit out as you go along, then you start, and if you change your mind while you do go with it, but try to start it knowing where you’re headed because it makes it easier imvho;

if you go for complicated shit like time travel figure that shit out before you start writing it including every possible repercussion because you’ll hate yourself if you don’t;

don’t try to re-do what others did obviously. I mean, if I wanted to write rep for non standard attractive cishet women I would not try to re-write brienne of tarth just changing the hair color. I would try to take the same tropes he’s using, change the setting and go with it, but it shows if you read a book and your character is the exact same as your favorite writer’s. like, if you read ian tregillis’s milkweed tryptich it’s going to be obvious that one of the main characters is the same tropes as jaime but that guy has enough personality differences and an enough different background and circumstances of upbringing that while you can see it has the same basics (generally nice guy forced to do horrid things who wants to redeem himself, live without his overbearing sister who wants to control him and has a generally straight moral compass), you don’t think ‘oh ian tregillis who is grrm’s friend has copied from him and put jaime lannister in a wwii alternate history trilogy’. like, we all have our tropes and our favorite writers and it’s good to take inspiration and homage them, but try to give your spin on those tropes you’re using, because otherwise it’ll just look lazy;

do whatever the fuck you want with your plot. don’t think about what others would want to read - it’s your story and you should tell it the way you want to. then please listen to criticism and find people who’ll provide it for you without tearing down your work but telling you what works and what doesn’t, but like... if you want to touch some themes or write characters from a different background or whatever do it;

also, do your research. I mean, I could have written the ludlow massacre story because:a) I read all of john reed’s articles pertaining to that specific happening and those articles include interviews with the people who were there, a description of who they were, an extremely detailed reconstruction of the facts and so on;b) there’s folk songs, two novels and one opera on ludlow not including history books, so it’s not only easily readable upon, but you also can see the impact it had in media/the american culture.so, even if I’m not american, having read all of that, I could have probably gone for it and done a decent job, find someone with a history degree to veto it and go for it. but like, again, unless you’re writing the coffee shop au or the ya or the kind of novel that does not require an established setting or you are making the entire worldbuilding up from scratch with no influences from the real world, you can’t not do at least some basic research. and when reading something, it does show if the author has at least done basic research or if they’re winging it. then they might be good enough that you don’t care they’re winging it, but still, research XD because research also gives you a lot more ideas that you might not have taken previously into account and might save you a plot detail or so;

I also would advice not to write what you know - because that’s easy and it doesn’t let you go out of your comfort zone and at some point what you know will finish -, but: write something you know. as in, my blade runner + high fidelity au should be scifi and touch stuff idk shit about, but since it’s a high fidelity au half of it is supposed to be set in a (pseudo) record shop and the protagonist miiiiiight have a thing or a hundred for springsteen. now: who has spent half of her life in record shops and is into bruce? yes, me. now, the character in question has zero in common with yours truly except for that, but let me tell you that if there is one thing I know how to write that you can’t convince me I couldn’t write is someone into springsteen who hangs around record shops. I know my people and I know why someone would be into springsteen. like, when making up characters and you want to make them relatable or you want to relate to them more, give them one thing you can relate to even if it’s dumb - idk you like strawberries? that character also likes strawberries and so on - because that will get you closer to them and your reader will feel it. it’s a thing I do with fanfic all the time - like if I have to try and write someone IC I try to relate to one thing they have if I can, because that makes the characters more relatable and it’s easier. ie when I was like ‘how do I crack the jaime pov’ the answer was ‘ALL THE BAD SELF-DEPRECATING HUMOR YOU DO ALL THE TIME GO DOWN ON IT’ bc that’s what I relate to jaime for and so on. idk that is a thing that’s always helped me when coming up with any character so I guess it might be useful advice? *shrug*

(obv: if you’re writing a 100% bad guy that you don’t empathize with then you don’t have to, I mean grrm did say he had to take a shower after writing chapters from A Certain POV because it’s horrible being in their head so like.... you can feel disgust at what you’re writing esp. if it’s the POV of a terrible person, but That Character resonated with people and felt relatable to some of them because to them they had... RELATABLE moments/humane moments too so if you’re writing bad guys but try to not make them cardboard cuts/TOO HORRIBLE it will make them stronger as *bad guys*. mvho.)

but mostly: read a lot of stuff, try to put your spin on things and don’t gaf about what people think until you finished it. then you can worry about concrit xD

#janie writes #long post for ts #writing advice #i guess #Anonymous #ask post

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languagemadness · 6 years

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38 Classic Polish Books You Should Know (About)

requested by anon

That’s a hell of a Buzzfeed title, wow! I focused solely on books, but you need to remember that poems play a HUGE part in Polish literature in general. Instead of doing a list of "classic Polish texts", which would include full-on books, poems, dramas, everything, and would be probably 18637 positions long, I did only some of the most important books, dramas, and comic books. If you’d like me to tell you more about anything on this list, cover something more in detail, or make another list — shoot me an ask!

I ordered the list NOT by how much I like these books or how strongly I’d recommend them. The list is ordered from the easiest ones to the toughest ones -- literarily, not linguistically.

Also, I know that the ask was about classical books, which I too included in this list.

Let’s start with something approachable — comic books and "normal" books that are so easy and pleasant to read. Except for the two books about war — they’re approachable but the topic doesn’t really make them pleasant.

Pan Samochodzik by Zbigniew Nienacki

A series of books about Pan Samochodzik, who’s an art historian and a detective, and his job is to solve theft, smuggling, and forgery cases. He’s basically a mix of Indiana Jones and Hercules Poirot. The background for the books is life in Polish People’s Republic, but it’s actually shown not as rough as it was in real life. Apart from that, they’re basically children’s books — very light, easy, and funny.

I’d definitely recommend them, I mean, who doesn’t like stories like that? Plus, you don’t need to be God knows how good with Polish to read them.

adaptations: There are 4 movies and a TV show based on the books, each based on a different book from the series.

Podróże z Herodotem by Ryszard Kapuściński

You can read it even when you’re like 10 because it’s a very nice, easy, pleasant story. An autobiography where the author describes his travels to Asia and Africa and compares them to the travels of Herodotus. Very interesting, often funny, it gives you a full view of different people and cultures and how rich the world is. It teaches you a little bit of history, it teaches you a little bit about the modern world (I think the story starts in the 1950s), and the comparison between these two — it’s really fascinating to see that, generally, the world hadn’t changed that much.

I would wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone.

W pustyni i w puszczy by Henryk Sienkiewicz

The only book I cried on and not because it was so beautiful, but because it was so painful to read. Okay, I was like 11 when I read it, but technically it’s a book for kids, so…

It’s a story about two kids who get lost in Africa and they hike through like 5 countries to find their fathers (who worked in Africa and just happened to forget to take their children one day I guess?). Really, it’s about friendship, dedication, love, all the important values in life. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s painfully boring to read.

It’s a wonderful story, don’t get me wrong, and I loved it as a child — but the movie. The book I hated. So I do recommend it, but the movie.

adaptations: 2 TV shows and 2 movies (the one from 2001 being the most popular).

Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek by Henryk Jerzy Chmielewski

Comic books. Two friends try to humanize a monkey while traveling and exploring different areas of science and history. It’s funny, absurd, educational, and understandable for non-advanced learners of Polish.

Do I recommend? Absolutely.

adaptations: 2 episodes of a short TV show, a video game, and a movie from 2002 titled "Tytus, Romek i A’Tomek wśród złodziei marzeń" — but it’s not based on the comics, only on the characters.

Kajko i Kokosz by Janusz Christa

A series of comic books which is basically a Polish version of “Asterix”. It’s about two Slavic warriors who have all kinds of adventures and fights with Zbójcerze. It’s all fictional and to be honest, I don’t really remember much from the comics, but I know that I loved them as a child. There are also renewals of the old volumes as well as new stories based on the original story and they’re coming out even in 2018.

I wouldn’t say it’s something you absolutely have to read, but if you want to, then it’s worth your time.

adaptations: A TV show that’s still being made and a video game.

Zemsta by Aleksander Fredro

Language-wise, it is pure genius. Not too easy, though. The jokes, the phrases, the sayings — it is the base of common Polish language. Story-wise, it’s basically Polish Romeo and Juliet. Two families live in a castle and hate each other, a girl from one family is in love with a guy from the other family. We also get some more important side characters, they’re very nicely written, iconic even. The whole drama is hilarious, so yes I would calmly recommend it to people who are somewhat fluent in Polish.

adaptations: 2 movies (the one from 2002 being more popular).

Wiedźmin by Andrzej Sapkowski

I think it’s the definition of contemporary classic. It’s a series of short stories, later an actual book, later comics, and finally a movie and a video game. The book is about this witcher and a child of destiny who’s a witcher-in-training. The main character needs to protect her. The stories and comics, however — they’re obviously about the witcher, but I don’t know the details.

If I’m 100% frank, I have not read the stories, the book, the comics, nothing. So I can’t fully recommend it to you, but I can tell you this: everyone who’s into fantasy is crazy about it. I suppose if you like fantasy, Wiedźmin’s a must.

adaptations: A movie from 2001, a TV show from 2002, and a video game.

Solaris by Stanisław Lem

This one’s, on the other hand, is a must if you’re into sci-fi. It’s about contact: with aliens, other civilizations, the unknown — but it’s not specified, which actually makes the book so interesting.

It’s been translated into multiple languages, so I’d say it’s easy to get, and if you’re either into sci-fi or into modern Polish literature — do read it.

adaptations: 3 movies (in 2002 Soderbergh made it a movie, so I suppose it’s worth checking out, but I personally haven’t watched it).

Kamienie na szaniec by Aleksander Kamiński

A story of 3 boys who just graduated from high school when WW2 broke out. It’s an actual story of actual people and it is heartbreaking. If you want to read anything about the WW2 that isn’t very technical or boring, this book is definitely for you. It’s about normal lives in abnormal circumstances and you get very attached to the characters and their stories, and the book actually makes you feel things.

Would recommend.

adaptations: A movie from 1977 titled "Akcja pod Arsenałem", which is based on the book, and a movie from 2014 under the same title as the book, also only based on it.

Medaliony by Zofia Nałkowska

An omnibus of short stories about WW2. Very short, very shocking, sometimes even disgusting. The stories are about people who survived the war and they are actual things that actually happened. I don’t think I get appalled easily, but those are horrifying, really.

A good recommendation for someone who wants to learn about the more (or less) humane side of the war. I would actually say it’s a must if you want to at least begin to understand the tragedy that WW2 was.

And now we’re moving onto some more… mature books. Those are usually compulsory readings in middle school and high school, and to get what they’re about, you need to have some common knowledge. Nothing too specific, though. And there’s a lot to them that you can enjoy even if you don’t know much about general Polish culture and history, so I would say giving them a shot is definitely worth it. Plus, you can learn a lot if you’re a careful reader.

Lalka by Bolesław Prus

Hands down my favorite Polish book of all times. The best thing they made me read in school and I swear this book made the 12 years of tears and pain that I spent in school worth it. Long story short, it’s about a dude from quite a poor family and he becomes rich for an aristocrat he loves very, very deeply. But she’s a total bitch and uses him like an old rag. Don’t get me wrong, I really don’t like romance but Lalka… I mean, the lengths he went for her, the things he did for her… I don’t want to spoil the book but it’s full of dramatic events, interesting characters, surprises, and most importantly — it’s absolutely exciting for the reader! It truly sucks you in. Not to mention the book in a phenomenal way shows how Polish society of the 1870s functioned and thought. And don’t even get me started on the psychology of single characters. I’ve read only a few books in my life that made me feel so passionate about their characters. Character-building-wise, Lalka is the peak of art.

If you want to read only one book from this list, this is the one.

adaptations: Tons of plays, a movie (1968) and a TV show (1978). Pretty accurate, but I personally didn’t like them.

Potop by Henryk Sienkiewicz

There’s a trilogy: Ogniem i mieczem, Potop, Pan Wołodyjowski — and they tell the history of Poland in the 17th century. For some reason, only Potop is considered an absolute must, but if I’m honest I didn’t read it, so I personally can’t recommend it to you. Potop itself is about a guy who wants to marry this girl but she thinks he betrayed the country, so he needs to clear his name by fighting by the king’s side. It sounds very fairy-tale-like, but the background is actual history and the author himself operates incredibly well with the real and the imaginary.

The thing with Sienkiewicz’s historical books is that they are pretty damn good, so even if you’re not too much into that kinda stuff but there’s a tiny part of curiosity in you, I don’t think it’s a mistake to check it out.

adaptations: A movie from 1974.

Krzyżacy by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Basically when Poland was all… under occupation and non-existent, Sienkiewicz wrote this book to bitch about Germanization, as well as to remind the Polish people about their country. The book is about the great times of Poland, from 1399 all the way to the greatest battle of 1410 when Poland kicked Prussia’s ass. But we also get some romance, some schemes, some awful deaths… The full set if you will.

A lot of people say it’s a super ass boring book, but in my opinion, it’s absolutely fantastic. The details, the numerosity of threads (that somehow doesn’t confuse you at all), again the imaginary intwining with the real… I do recommend it not only to people who are into history, but to anyone looking for a good read that would explain a bit of Polish nature.

adaptations: A movie from 1960.

Quo vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz

Honey is this one fantastic… It’s a story about a Christian girl in Nero’s Rome and a non-Christian guy who’s in love with her. Of course, at first it looks like a love story, which it is, but there’s so much to it. The book is a knockout of a description of what life was like in ancient Rome. Everything from history, through society, to things like the time of bathing of each social class — there’s everything. And, what’s even better, it’s not boring at all! Actually, the book is unbelievably well-balanced between eventful, not overwhelming, and detailed.

I would definitely, definitely recommend. It’s not exactly a must and if you want to read a Sienkiewicz historical book, then Krzyżacy or Potop would be a better idea since they’re about Poland, but Quo vadis would most definitely not be a waste of time.

adaptations: 6 movies (the one from 2001 is the most popular one), a TV show, and a ton of plays.

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

A book you either love or hate. I personally love it, I’m kin with this book, whatever. While reading it, I agreed with every single sentence, with every single opinion, I felt like it was me who wrote it in my past life or something. Just. An. Extraordinary. Book. Remember when I said that Lalka was the reason why I didn’t hate school? It was, but Ferdydurke is the reason I’m alive, kids.

It’s about a 30-year-old man who’s a writer (kinda), but he can’t write. Suddenly, he turns into a kid and is forced to go to school again. That’s just the plot of the book, however, because the story is simple, absurd, inconsistent, weird, and you don’t really read the book for the story. It’s what the story stands for. It’s about how pointless society is. How society creates idiotic rules to standardize people and to take away any creativity or any will to live. How people need to protect themselves and their originality but they can’t because originality doesn’t exist. And our main character explores all those philosophies. It’s a fantastic criticism of society, school, systems, classes, life.

Language-wise, it’s also a very interesting book. Definitely not an easy one. Gombrowicz was the master of language, the words and phrases he came up with, the ideas he hid within them. The language of his books creates, not only describes, the world from the books. His language is a whole different, self-sufficient being. Rare, striking, awe-inspiring.

As I said, somewhat philosophical and very metaphorical. You need to feel from your very heart what Gombrowicz means to understand this book.

adaptations: A theater performance from 1985 that you can watch on Youtube and a movie from 1991. I wouldn’t recommend watching them, though.

Sklepy cynamonowe by Bruno Schulz

Weird, metaphorical, a bit… insane? I love it. It’s an omnibus of short stories that are a description of the adult world through a child’s eyes. It’s like a dream, it’s impossible, it’s very soft and delicate and magical, really. It’s unlike anything. You feel like you’re reading a description of some very sensual dream. The stories make you wonder about the way people think, the way childhood affects your future life, the way the world works, and they make you realize that you don’t understand anything ever. But if you’re not looking for a deeper meaning, you can read the stories just for pleasure because they are honestly so sensual, sexy (but not porny, more like seductive), fascinating, and just strange, you actually read the stories with all of your senses. Makes you enter a whole different world and I will not exaggerate when I say that it changes your perception of everything.

As I said, it’s unlike anything you’ll ever encounter in life. A million out of ten would recommend.

adaptations: There is a short film from 1986 based on one of the stories from the book. It’s called "Ulica krokodyli".

Cudzoziemka by Maria Kuncewiczowa

One of my top 10. It is a story of the last day of a woman’s life. She knows she’s dying and she knows that all of her life she was in pain. So she recalls her entire life, all the big decisions she ever made, to find the source of her misery and to escape reality. It is a very sad book, but rather that depress the reader, it makes you think. It’s a story about alienation — the main character lived in a foreign country, never got to do what she actually wanted to do, never got to be with whoever she wanted to be with, and so everything she did, everywhere she went, everyone she spent time with, she felt out of place. The book was revolutionary in terms of composition and it explored the main character’s psychology very deeply. A fascinating, thought-provoking, original book.

Definitely would recommend.

adaptations: A movie from 1986.

And finally, books for the strong, books for the advanced, books for the masters. To get these, you actually need some strong background knowledge on Polish history and culture, especially society- and politics-wise. Don’t get me wrong, they’re not bad, they’re just… demanding.

Granica by Zofia Nałkowska

It is about… uhh… society, morality and the lengths a person can go to achieve what they want. Sounds complicated and serious, and it sort of is, but it’s also totally worth your time because it doesn’t really tire you as much as you could think it would. And it’s thought-provoking as well. It’s about this dude who has a wife, a career, and a lover, and he basically ruins his life and the lives of everyone around him — which is quite exciting and somewhat frightening to read. So if you’re into ambitious, psychological stuff, then I say yes! Go for it.

adaptations: A movie from 1938.

Chłopi by Władysław Reymont

It’s basically a longass description of one year in Polish countryside in the late 19th/early 20th century. Personally, I think it shows and defines the society of that time extremely well and it surely is admirable that someone wrote almost a thousand pages describing in detail things such as preparing cabbage for dinner or collecting crops. Reymont actually won the Nobel prize for this book.

Would recommend if you’re not looking for anything too thrilling. Even though the book has some iconic moments like taking away Jagna on a wheelbarrow cause she was a slut…

adaptations: A movie from 1922 and a TV show, which was later turned into a movie, from 1972.

Przedwiośnie by Stefan Żeromski

A Polish family in Russia (actually in Azerbaijan but before WW1 it was Russia, so). They live awesome lives until WW1 breaks out and the father has to leave the family. Then, the son goes a little nuts and joins communists and then there’s a revolution, the son gets traumatized and he runs away to Poland (where he’d never been before) where he’s looking for a prosperous life that his father had promised him. And Poland had just regained independence, so everyone hopes that it will be the oasis of prosperity and well-being once it’s renovated. The book is about how hope and gullibility (but mostly hope) are heartlessly crushed by reality. It is also a story about growing up because we follow the main character all the way from his careless youth through his war-and-revolution trauma to a point where he has to decide about his future. But most importantly, I think, it’s a historically important story. It was written when Poland was a new country and it was supposed to remind people that communism is bad and politics, in general, is crap, as well as propose some political solutions for the new country. That’s the general message but there are lighter moments like descriptions of Polish countryside, a lot of flirting with pretty girls, and even a murder.

It’s a good story, it’s a deep story — but not too complicated. And it’s actually very interesting, and I can promise you it’s not as heavy as I made it sound.

10/10 would recommend.

adaptations: Two movies — one from 1928 and one from 2001.

Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz

It’s an epic that describes life in the countryside in the 19th century. It was mainly written to remind Poles who had emigrated to France what a wonderful country Poland originally was, even though it was entirely under occupation, completely wiped off of any map. Naturally, everything there is presented through rose-colored glasses but still, if you’re looking for the classic of the classics, I suppose Pan Tadeusz is the book for you. If anyone wants to understand Polish literature, this book is a must.

Would I recommend? Sure if you’re here to sink in Polish culture or if you like quite full of adventure and yet easy reading. Easy as in the story’s nice and pleasant, the language is rather tedious.

adaptations: A surprisingly good and accurate movie from 1999. And the script is actually the text of the epic.

Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz

I think every Polish student hates Dziady. I didn’t, though. It’s a drama, actually, there are 4 parts of the drama, the last one not quite finished. I think the problem with Dziady is that no one really knows what it’s about. It was written in the mid 19th century, so again — Poland’s out of every map. The tzar is a bitch and Adam Mickiewicz disses him in the wildest of ways, but it doesn’t make sense until someone explains it to you. If you asked me what Dziady were about, in my opinion, all 4 parts are about love. Love for your country, love for your lover, love for yourself, love for other people, love for your family — all possible kinds of love. Sounds nice, right? That’s because it is nice. The problem with Dziady is that if you don’t delve deep into it, you won’t get it at all. The words as you read seem just like random words in a random order, no point whatsoever, skipping from topic to topic, all four parts at first seem completely unrelated. But the deeper you dig, the more you see. It is a very rich drama, there’s something in it for literally everyone, but it requires a ton of commitment and probably someone to guide you well through it.

Add it to my recommendations only if you are desperate to read it and if you have all the things above, aka time, commitment, and help. And language skills. The 2nd part, however, is short and it’s the easiest one, so do check it out.

adaptations: "Lawa" from 1989 is based on the second (which, in order, is the first) part of Dziady.

Wesele by Stanisław Wyspiański

It is such a deep drama that you just don’t get it. Kind of like with Dziady, except this one is waaay shorter and basically just disses everyone. In Dziady, the main character’s idea to show people love was to take control of them. Wesele, however, was about motivating people to do stuff by offending them.

Personally, Wesele is one of my favorites because it is just so problematic. Wyspiański attended a wedding in 1900 and then described it. Each guest in the drama (and at the actual wedding) represented an attitude that the general of Polish society had towards the country’s situation (occupation). And after 105 years of occupation, it seemed that the society didn’t really care anymore and just accepted their fate. Wyspiański was very much against that attitude. So basically what he did was he publicly washed the society’s dirty linen by pinning it onto his real-life friends. When Wesele premiered, people were actually chasing Wyspiański down the streets because they hated him so much. Not to mention that in the drama the whole offending thing is actually pretty profound and harsh. So much so that actual real-life guests weren’t enough for him — Wyspiański needed to introduce ghosts from the past, people who played an important role in Poland’s history. Of course, that was the author’s idea of motivating people to fight for their freedom.

The drama is full of references to Polish literature, Polish culture, and Polish history, so unless you’re fluent in these three, I wouldn’t tell you to read it.

I love Wesele with all my heart. If you want to give it a shot, instead of reading the actual drama, I’d suggest reading the story behind it and the summary and interpretations. This way you can enjoy it, which I think anyone should, without knowing much of the background. If I’m honest, you can’t really get much out of the drama itself. But I definitely recommend spending some time on this book, it’s definitely worth it.

adaptations: From 1973, it’s pretty good and quite accurate, but just a bit tiring.

Szewcy by Witkacy

Oh boy. A grotesque, modernist drama about the future of society, where the author basically talks about how people are doomed and headed for inevitable self-destruction. There’s a lot about how mechanic and inhumane people have become and of course tons of criticism towards society, revolution, capitalism, communism, and fascism.

I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t recommend because I didn’t really understand the language. It was a pain in the ass reading this book and if I had read it earlier in life, I assure you that W pustyni i w puszczy wouldn’t be the only book that made me cry from pain.

adaptations: Tons of theater performances that you can watch on Youtube.

Tango by Stanisław Mrożek

It’s a drama about generation gap and some ideas to live by (like conformism or anarchy). Sounds complex, but it actually keeps it very simple and short, a kid would get it, really, and yet the story actually stays with you. It also makes you wonder about a place and meaning of an intellectualist in society. Not to mention the hilarious and absurd situations like convincing your grandma to just die already.

Personally, I enjoyed it. Even though it’s about quite serious stuff, it’s hilarious, so you do read it with pleasure.

adaptations: There are multiple theater performances available to watch on Youtube.

Balladyna by Juliusz Słowacki

The main idea behind the drama is how good and evil both function simultaneously in this world and the fight between the two. A nymph sends a prince to the main character’s house. The main character wants to marry the prince, so she does a lot of awful things. Basically. It’s a nice story, though strange. A story that you would read to a child, except the language of the drama is… complicated. Let’s be honest — it’s Romanticism after all.

I would recommend it, but I wouldn’t die to make someone read it.

adaptations: There is this absolutely awful movie from 2009 (English title: The Bait). It’s loosely based on Balladyna.

Kordian by Juliusz Słowacki

It’s about this guy who plans to kill the tzar. There was a deeper meaning too but don’t ask me about it, I just don’t remember. To be honest, it was surprisingly pleasant to read and sometimes quite funny (I don’t think it was supposed to be, though). But I wouldn’t recommend it unless you know a whole lot about Polish history and culture — or unless you’re dangerously interested in it. And I mean like, you’d kill and die for it.

Nie-Boska komedia by Zygmunt Krasiński

To be honest, it’s a weirdly good story and what surprises me most about it is that it’s actually understandable, even though it’s quite a typical romantic drama. Interesting, huh…

It’s about a man who is looking for his artistic self, leaves his family to pursue his art, and then there’s him trying to protect his country. It was actually written to criticize this romantic way of thinking and living, so there are a few moments where the author just dissed other authors of the time, but most importantly, the story is a comment on the current (current for them) political and sociological events, as well as religion, and a way for Krasiński to express his opinions.

Recommend? Meh. It’s a good read but it’s not a must and you gotta be in a mood for it. Also, a solid historical and literary background would make the reading way easier.

My advice if you’re planning on reading any of these? Check the time period of the action. I swear if you do that and you pretty much can tell what the background for Poland was at the time, even just like one basic piece of information, it will make reading the book possible.

I think that’s about it. There are hundreds of other great Polish books that I can go on and on about (I can also talk about these for at least a few hours), so again -- if you have any questions, opinions, requests, anything, ask away.

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one-shoop · 4 years

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My mother actually admitted to a professional that she would "push us to face our fears" and "square up" or whatever when we were anxious. I don't know why this information doesn't make me happier. I have proof that she's the one who's been at the core of all my most complex mindsets -- like the "don't ask for help unless you really need it" and "am I hurt enough to be allowed to be sad" and "is this bad enough so I don't need to swallow it and search for solutions, or is this pain bad enough I can keep it". She literally admitted to doing all of that.

She's the reason I didn't ask for help in exams. She basically admitted to all the stuff she did as a mother -- her miraculously-unused scheme to push me off a bike so I wouldn't be scared of it anymore ("but pushing you nicely, so you don't actually get hurt, just to show you it's not scary" says mom like this excuses anything), all the times she talked about messing around with her students' rigidities and complex things (she called it "breaking them" like seriously) -- she'll "confront" autistic people or perfectionnists. She admitted to making sure the kid who hated losing loses at all games until he "learns to suck it up" and "accept things" or whatever, she admitted to messing up an autistic/rigid kid's meticulously arranged pieces of paper to "show them it didn't matter if they were messed up, it's the paper itself that counts", and doing that everytime they meet up, even going so far as pretending the kids actually like when she does that. How is this woman even a freaking orthopédagogue, I have no idea.

But she keeps "pushing them out of their comfort zones" and it's just not okay. And the way she talks to them, the way she behaves around them -- it pisses me off just thinking about it. And yesterday she confessed to her motives.

And -- this is a woman who said that the Roman Empire was justified, the murder of millions and all the crap was justified, that people were being stupid when they refused to have roman soldiers on their land -- this is a woman who said that "the tribes didn't want to be in peace, they wanted to keep fighting" and "Rome was keeping the peace". Someone who literally has no freaking reason to believe this crap -- seriously???? The Roman empire was garbage???? This is someone who said "well, if you see slavery as the limit, no civilisation ever was good" when I told her the goddamn empire worked on slaves' back, and refused to acknowledge how Caesar was a piece of garbage, how people watched prisoners of war get freaking KILLED in arenas like it was a fun thing to watch.

Like seriously???? She told me "homeless people should just work harder" and "it doesn't mean society is broken if they can't get jobs/housing" and "it's their fault -- and I know, I watched a documentary once" and "most homeless people are idiots, they don't want to get healed, they want to do drugs and they're childish, they don't want to get jobs, they don't want to work" and "we can't force people to do things they don't want to do, they don't want to get healed so leave them be" and "they basically want to stay homeless" and "they can't handle having a job" and "there are shelters in place, so if they don't go there, they're basically saying they want to stay homeless" like sure mom, this is a good mindset. Absolutely -- i so agree with the humanity of "they don't want to work, so let them starve" like this is forgetting that many homeless peeps are mentally ill? Or addicted? And they CAN'T GET TREATMENT much less any sort of respect from people???? And shelters are the worst??? If I base it on my experience at an Elder's retirement home, let me tell you social workers can be assholes and retirement homes can be a hostile environment to its patients. And also???? Some homeless peeps just leave because OH SNAP maybe they got THROWN OUT OF THEIR HOUSE and and since they're going they have fucking nowhere to go? Like -- ever hear of someone losing their spouse and having nobody ro turn to, so they spend a night outside, and then another, and when their boss hears they fire them so now they're jobless and penniless and BAM. And ever heard of the concept that maybe BEING ALCOHOLIC ISN'T CONTROLLABLE WITHOUT EXTERNAL HELP and do I really have to explain how buying alcohol/weed and being left to starve and freeze and get mugged all the time -- like seriously, there is NO REASON you should LET SOMEONE DIE.

Like ffs?????????? She said bombing an entire town full of civilians was a good move???? Since "they didn't want to surrender, they were too proud" and "they were too stubborn to give up so they had to be shown we wouldn't back down" like wow, minimalizing much??? We're talking about two whole goddamn towns being blown away -- imagine freaking Montreal just blown away like that. Those bombs were MASSIVE. Imagine the freaking KIDS. Seriously -- she can't bear to watch documentaries on the atomic bombs, it should be enough to make her realize that hey, maybe if something is too horrible to watch, you shouldn't DO IT TO PEOPLE? Nor excuse it????

Said that our country "didn't do too much slavery" and "WE were nice people, not like the English" and "we lived in peace" like seriously???? Remember all those times native people got sold as slaves??? Remember how métis came to be, with white people going in forests, stopping for a night at a tribe, and raping a woman there????? And then that woman would get expelled and her baby would be shunned for not belonging either with the white bastards or with the mother's birth tribe?? Remember how Montréal was built to be a freaking conversion thing for the native peoples thar lived near??? Remember how we had missionaries?

Remember that time she kept saying that in the Bible, the Jewish people were the bad guys -- the Romans were good? Defending the dude from the washing hands thing, saying he had no other choice to keep the people happy than to kill J-boy, and saying it was "the Jewish religious leaders's" fault for all of it? For "forcing people to hate him"? Saying the Jewish people were jerks like they didn't want to pay taxes to this guy who invaded their land, right??? Well apparently they're jerks for that???

Saying Sikh community people can never get into politics because "politicians are supposed to represent the majority of their people, and they're never part of the majority anywhere" and rolling her eyes when I say "what, so what you're saying is that if you're part of that community, you can't EVER get into politics? What if it was your dream??? Should you give up your religion to be allowed to compete?"

And apparently all of that is because of some "book" she read once about how to deal with anxiety in kids. How, apparently, this "book" was enough to spark all of this nonsense.

Like wtf mom

Wtf

Like for someone who keeps talking about "facing your fears" she sure is ignoring a whole lot of information back here. Like ever heard of someone dismissing the truth because it's too hard? Like if this was really your philosophy I'd think you'd be the first one to fall out bs propaganda and fight for a better place and a more compassionate view of others, and like -- her philosophy is supposed to be about confronting your fears to work on them like how tf can you do that without even admitting there's a problem???? She's making shif up for a shitton of historical shit that have literally no fucking data on all the goodness she pretends exists -- like seriously man just google literally any of those things and you'll have proof it happened -- even NOW we have literal places where every native person lives like some weird ghetto bht wirh government funding. Native lands aren't even legally recognized by our bs country, they don't have a fucking representative or their own, they don't even have their own province ffs they live in shitty places where poverty happens because SURPRISE when you strip someone of their land, their dignity, their culture, and their religion, and all their space to just freaking exist -- MAYBE it fucks them up. And just MAYBE being stripped of your integrity as a person and a clan is MAYBE stripped away and MAYBE you have nothing to really do with your identity. So MAYBE you should consider that when you pretend the shit our people did wasn't completely horrific. MAYBE you'd understand how desperatly something needs to be done.

And ALL OF THIS just doesn't cut it for a goddamn book about education or whatever it was. I dont know what this is but this just feels like fucking victim blaming. This can't be about "facing your fears", this is about dictating them, this is about making things up, about controlling the reality. This is about making the reality to be more pleasant for you to live in, this is about you controlling people to see things as you do. This is about you thinking people will never like you if you outright say you agree with the goddamn empire so you pretend there's some silver lining on it.

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taikoturtle · 7 years

Text

Trimberly Short Fic

From the tumblr prompt “Actually… I just miss you.”

Requested by @clairebear1127 nearly four months ago and I’m so sorry I’m only getting to this now but I hope you like it!

read it on AO3

Trini doesn’t consider herself a needy person, but when she agreed to continue her long distance relationship with Kimberly after high school she failed to anticipate just how much she’d come to miss her. How much she’d miss waking up beside her on a lazy Saturday morning, cuddled beneath a snug blanket with Kimberly’s arms wrapped around her in a warm embrace. How much she’d miss being able to call her up on a sudden whim to grab coffee, or see her at the drop of a hat should either of them have a horrible day and need to vent.

And okay, when Trini says long distance, she really means it’s just a six hour drive that separates them and she should be grateful that it’s not a flight halfway around the world, but going from a ten minute bike ride to a six hour car ride is still a significant adjustment in her books.

After high school graduation, Trini and Kimberly sent out several applications to various colleges and universities both in and around Angel Grove, as well as a few that were out of state. Kimberly got into one of her top choices miles and miles away.

Trini did not.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Kimberly had said one day when they were in her room with acceptance letters scattered around in a mess of papers and ripped envelopes.

“You’re not leaving me,” Trini responded softly, “you’ll just be leaving Angel Grove. I don’t want to be the reason you hold yourself back. You’ve got so much potential and if you got into one of your top choices then you deserve to go.”

Kimberly looked broken, absolutely torn with indecision, but Trini pulled her into a tight hug and told her not to worry. She wanted to reassure her that everything would be okay, but she also wanted to prevent Kimberly from seeing the pain that was so clearly written on her face. It would be a tough road ahead, and as much as Trini wanted to be selfish, to tell Kimberly to stay by her side, it just wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

“We’ll make it work, I promise.”

So off she went to a four year college while Trini stayed back to attend Angel Grove University. By all means, AGU is still a tremendously great school to attend, however it’s just not the same without the gang all together.

Trini went in undeclared. She figured she could knock out a majority of her required general courses first and would settle on a major later down the road. Her parents want her to be a doctor or a nurse, just anything in the medical field that’ll be lucrative, but they obviously don’t know her that well. Stitching people up has never been her strong point; she excels at putting bodies in the hospital, not the other way around. However, she has another year or so to figure it out before she has to declare so she’s not particularly worried.

Instead, the thoughts that occupy her mind are more often than not, entirely Kimberly-oriented, like what is she up to right now, or what new friends has she made.

What crushes she might be developing.

And it’s totally stupid, Trini knows. She can trust Kimberly - she trusts her with her life - but Kimberly’s activity on social media had a nasty habit of generating a conflicting cocktail of happiness, jealousy, and insecurity. Slowly her Instagram feed was filling with strangers’ faces and unknown names.

It felt like Trini was being replaced, and though it hurt like a bitch, she took solace in the fact that as long as Kimberly was happy, then so was she.

In the beginning, they talked on the phone nearly every night, recounting the day’s events to one another. Kimberly checked out several clubs on campus ranging from casual sports to cultural focused and she sounded absolutely ecstatic. Everything was new and shiny and it always brought a smile to Trini’s lips as she layed in bed with the phone pressed to her cheek, staring at her bedroom ceiling as Kimberly gushed about every little detail. She looked forward to her phone calls and the occasional video Skype with Kimberly, it’s often what motivated her throughout the day, but as the weeks passed through the quarter, things started changing.

The calls came less and less frequently. Between studying for classes and club obligations, Kimberly simply had no time or was too tired from spreading herself thin. It didn’t help that Trini applied for a job on campus at the convenience store near the food court so any respite from the hustle and bustle of work and classes was hard to come by.

Their conversations turned into sporadic texts whenever either could spare a moment and it was starting to take a toll on Trini’s nerves.

Once she had asked her mom if she could borrow the car for the weekend, to which June simply scoffed and denied her outright.

“The car is a privilege reserved for school,” she stated firmly, “and nothing more.”

It deflated Trini on the spot. She was this close to packing her bags for the weekend and toughing out a drive to go see Kimberly, but no car meant no road trip, so she skulked her way back upstairs and tossed herself onto her bed, dejected and full of frustration.

She wanted to talk about her feelings and reservations with Kimberly, but every time she tried, something held her back and she would end up having a change of heart.

I’m not jealous, Trini would convince herself, I’m not needy. Kimberly can hang out with whoever she wants. I’m not going to be that person who restricts her from having fun or keep tabs on who she sees on a daily basis.

“Dude, just tell her.” Zack, in his ever blunt yet insightful way, would advise. “If you guys are really that good with each other, then just communicate that clearly. Nothing good ever comes from bottling things up or assuming shit about how the other may feel.”

Zack remained in Angel Grove and got a job as an apprentice at an auto mechanic’s shop so he could help support his mom while feeding his interest in cars. This often made him the most accessible whenever Trini needed a friend to lean on, so they’d end up going to Krispy Kreme’s and Trini would treat him to donuts and coffee while she voiced her concerns. He’d try and respectfully deny the free food, but it was her way of paying him back for all the times she subjected him to her woeful rants.

“If it’s bugging you this much, you gotta say something,” he said before somehow shoving an entire glazed donut into his mouth in one go.

Trini cringed at his eating habits, but took his words to heart.

“God, why is this so difficult?”

With only a couple weeks left in the quarter, Trini finds herself lying on her back in bed on a Saturday night with books strewn every which way in preparation for finals. Carefully highlighted notes and open textbooks mean nothing to her when they look like ancient hieroglyphics given her current state.

It’s hard to study with Kimberly on the mind.

“Kimberly, can we talk? No, that sounds like I’m going to break up with her. Kimberly, there’s something important I need to tell you? No, that still sounds too… bad.”

Trini rolls over and angrily lets out a huff. Her phone rests inches away from her hand, the screen dark and inactive, and a yearning ache fills her chest with a swallowing, hollow emptiness.

She misses everyone.

She misses the gang altogether, she misses their hangouts and training sessions, and she misses that feeling of belonging, like a true family in many ways.

Her lecture halls at the university are far too large to make any true friends, and while her parents are trying their best to be more warm and receptive, Trini still feels like a stranger in her own home. The Power Rangers were everything to her, but now that they are fractured with their lives headed in different directions, Trini doesn’t know where she fits into the picture anymore.

Most of all, she misses Kimberly.

Warm tears pool at the corners of her eyes before trickling down the sides of her face. She doesn’t even try to wipe them away because there’s no use; they’re not stopping because the growing void in her chest isn’t going away.

She hates feeling so pitiful because normally people regard her as the strong one, where nothing can faze her, but things such as this strikes a deep chord within her. She knows what it felt like to be alone, but now that she knows what it feels like to have been a part of something bigger, she doesn’t want to go back.

“Why can’t things just be simple?” Trini mutters to herself quietly. “Growing up sucks.”

TAP TAP TAP

A loud rapping on the window startles her out of her wallowing musings and her senses fire on high alert. Memories of Rita flash before her eyes and fear begins to grip her nerves. Jaw clenched and fists balled, Trini slides off her bed and cautiously approaches the window.

There’s no way it could be Rita again. They knocked her into the sky ages ago so it makes no sense that she would return now, let alone have the common decency to knock. It could be a new enemy that Zordon didn’t inform them of, but once again, why would they even bother to knock. Unless…?

Gulping heavily with uneasy anticipation, Trini’s clammy hand grips the curtain and yanks it aside in one swift motion.

“Kimberly?!”

Grinning like a kid, Kimberly waves excitedly at her from beyond the weathered glass.

What the hell is she doing here?

“You going to let me in or not?” Kimberly asks through clattering teeth. “It’s freaking cold out here.”

Shaking off her stupor, Trini fumbles with the locks on her window before hastily yanking it open. A chilly gust of crisp winter air fills the room as Kimberly hops over the sill and lands on the carpet beyond the cluttered desk. Trini closes the window securely and gapes at her in stunned disbelief.

Her hair is longer than the last time they skyped, resting a few inches below her shoulders, and she looks absolutely amazing in her dark washed jeans, cranberry colored shirt and sleek leather jacket, but those details get tossed to the wayside the moment Kimberly’s lips come crashing down on hers.

Trini stumbles backwards from the sheer force, her back bumping into the desk, spilling pencils and papers everywhere, but she doesn’t care because Kimberly is pressing against her hungrily as if making up for lost time or the long distance that’s come between them.

In some ways it feels like it has been years since Trini’s felt the warmth of Kimberly’s body, smelled the comforting scents of her tropical shampoo, or heard her light, breathy moans. She’s missed how familiar her lips feel against her own and how her hands seem right at home clutching at the small of Kimberly’s back.

It leaves Trini wanting more, craving to dive deeper and lose herself to the fire running through her veins, but she has so many questions lingering at the back of her hazy mind that she can’t ignore.

Trini pulls back, breaking the kiss and causing Kimberly’s lips to give chase for a second before she pauses and gazes at her. Chest heaving in and out, gasping for air, Trini swallows thickly as she maintains eye contact, searching for the right words.

“What are you doing here, Kim?”

Flinching at the question, Kimberly chuckles weakly. “Not happy to see me?”

Trini presses a soft, gentle kiss to Kimberly’s lips and smiles. “Dummy. I’m always happy to see you, but…” Her words trail off in hesitation - where does she even begin? “...Why now?”

“I… uh…” Kimberly’s brow furrows, her eyes now averted. She’s biting her lip as if contemplating the heaviest question in the world, but after several more beats of silence - save for their now even breathing - she continues on. “Okay well, actually… I just miss you.”

“You do?”

“Of course!” Kimberly breathes out instantly. “And I know I haven’t been the best at keeping up with our calls and everything, but I’m going to work on it because god, I just miss you so much. I didn’t want to bother you since I know you’re busy with work and your family, but I think about you everyday and I finally couldn’t take it anymore so… here I am.”

Her glistening eyes are downcast through the whole confession, and it isn’t until she takes a deep, shuddering breath does she dare look back at Trini. “I’m not being too needy, am I?”

What an ironic turn of events.

Those very same thoughts that had been plaguing her mind for months on end had been the same thorn in Kimberly’s side.

A muted laugh escapes Trini’s mouth and at first it draws a sour, hurt expression on Kimberly’s features, but she immediately explains herself.

“Honestly, I was feeling the same way,” Trini starts tentatively. “I didn’t want to come off as too clingy or controlling and seeing how much fun you were having on your instagram and snapchat stories I was just… jealous? Afraid maybe? I don’t know, but whatever the case, I just want you to know that I’m sorry.”

She doesn’t know whether Kimberly can hear the pain in her voice or feel the trembling in her limbs, but at that moment she knew precisely what was needed.

Pulling Trini into a crushing hug, Kimberly squeezes her tightly and whispers just for her.

“I love you Trini.”

It’s sincere and vulnerable and exactly what Trini needed to hear. Beyond the words, the hug itself is charged with unspoken emotions–it says reassurance, it means unending devotion, it’s the promise of a future together.

“I love you too.”

It’s nearing four in the morning by the time Trini flops on her back, gasping for air and with a thin layer of perspiration coating her skin. Her face is flushed and fatigued, but clearly satisfied. “I’ve definitely missed this.”

Kimberly stifles a laugh, not wanting to wake anyone in the household - especially in their current state of undress.

Rolling lazily onto her side, Trini frowns slightly as she stares oddly at Kimberly. “You know, I’ve been wondering something.”

“Yeah?”

“How exactly did you get here? You don’t have a car and the buses don’t run this late.”

Kimberly inhales sharply. “So... funny story, but I might have borrowed the Pterodactyl Zord.”

“You what?!”

Zordon gave Kimberly the biggest scolding of her life about abusing their powers and risking exposure, but damn was it worth it.

#trimberly #trini x kimberly #pink lemonade #trimberly fanfic #power rangers #power rangers 2017 #thank you for waiting 84 years for this #clairebear1127 #asks #trimberly prompts #myfanfic

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chasholidays · 7 years

Note

MINTY and something with them reuniting after being apart a long time super fluffy pls

Like, he assumes, most people, Nate has a past that’s full of people he loved and lost track of, and the first one he can really remember is Monty Green.

When he thinks about it, he wants to second-guess the word love, because he was a kid. They were best friends when Nate was in first grade and Monty was in kindergarten, and Nate adored him. Monty was bright and mischievous and fun, a born troublemaker with an angelic smile that let him get away with anything. Nate loved him, but it’s easy to think that it wasn’t real love, something like that. In Nate’s opinion, you can’t really love someone until you know what it means, until you know what you’re saying. And back then, all he’d known was that Monty was his favorite person, and he never wanted him to leave. He told his dad they were going to get married, and his dad smiled and said he hoped he did.

(It would be years before he remembered that, and when he did, he loved his father so fiercely it hurt, for a minute.)

Instead, Monty’s mother got a new job, and they moved to California. He and Nate hugged each other goodbye, and Nate cried about it, but that had been it. He’d made new friends, found new crushes, and while he filed away “passionate friendship for other boy at age six” as part of his journey into queerness, he mostly thinks of Monty Green as just one more person he cared for who’s gone now, like his high school boyfriend and his college roommate. If he saw them again, he’d say hi, be happy, and when they friend him on Facebook, he accepts and is happy to see updates about their lives. But they’re never going to be close again, not like they were.

Of course, he’s not even Facebook friends with Monty, so it matters even less with him. Nate is sure he’s never going to see him again.

So sure that when he does see him, he figures he must be wrong.

He and Bellamy are at Bellamy’s favorite coffee shop, definitely not stalking the cute artist who comes in at roughly the same time they do on Saturdays. Per Bellamy, it’s not stalking because they were already coming in at this time before this, and just because they decided to make it a set thing instead of a loose engagement, it’s not stalking. It’s just making plans to be somewhere when someone else might be there too.

It’s also not stalking because Shut up, Miller, which is a worse argument.

Today, when they walk into the coffee shop, the artist is at her usual table, but she’s not alone, and Bellamy’s shoulders slump a little. Nate gets that it’s not a real thing for him, but it’s one of those fun fantasies. She’s always drawing cool stuff, and she’s pretty. Even if Bellamy knew nothing was ever going to happen, it’s nice to have a person to think about. And now that person is apparently not single.

The guy is facing Bellamy’s artist, which means that they’re just seeing the back of his head when they come in, but their usual table is behind the artist, because Bellamy is more interested in peering over her shoulder at her sketchpad than he is at looking at her expression. So once Nate’s got his coffee and has settled in across from Bellamy, he sees the guy full on.

The first thing he notices is that he’s hot. He’s working on a laptop, so he’s looking down, but Nate can still see his jawline and the slight curve of his smile. He and the artist are talking, quietly enough Nate can’t really hear them, but the guy laughs sometimes, and that’s what he realizes that the other thing he’s feeling is familiarity. It doesn’t take long to realize the guy reminds him of Monty, and he finds himself navigating to Facebook, looking to see if he can find any old pictures of them with half his attention as he keeps stealing glances back at the table.

Bellamy kicks him. “Dude.”

“What?”

“It’s not a big deal, you can stop looking at him.”

“He looks familiar. I think he’s–”

The guy looks up and their eyes meet, and his face breaks out in this huge grin. He closes the laptop and comes over, the artist turning to watch him, and Bellamy looks like he wants to die. It would probably be funny, if he had enough brainpower to focus on Bellamy.

“Nate, right?” asks the guy. Monty, rather. Definitely Monty. “Nate Miller? It’s totally Nate.”

“Monty?”

Impossibly, Monty’s grin broadens. “Holy shit!” He takes Nate’s hand and tugs him up, and suddenly he’s getting hugged, before he’s even quite caught up. He doesn’t get hugged much, but Monty is very solid, smells like coffee and sweat, is an amazing hugger.

“I think I missed something,” Nate hears, vaguely, and when Monty pulls back, he realizes the artist has come over. The small part of him that’s aware of things that aren’t Monty registers that she’s standing next to Bellamy, so Bellamy totally owes him.

“This is Nate!” Monty says, grinning at her. “He was my best friend forever in kindergarten.”

“I think if he was just your best friend in kindergarten, it doesn’t really count as forever,” she teases.

Monty waves his hand. “Details. Seriously, I can’t believe it!” he says, turning his attention back to Nate. “What are the odds?”

Nate’s feeling pretty disbelieving himself. “No idea. Good to see you, man,” he adds, and feels like the biggest tool of all time.

But Monty is still smiling. “Yeah. Good to see you too.”

It turns out the artist’s name is Clarke, and she and Monty went to college together. Monty recently got a job with Ark, Nate’s favorite indie game developer, so he’s new in town and looking for a social life.

Which means that Bellamy owes him for the rest of their lives and then some, because Monty wants Nate to be involved in that.

“Best friends are forever, right?” he asks, as he puts his number into Nate’s phone.

“I thought you said Jasper was your best friend,” says Clarke, sounding dubious. She and Bellamy are giving them a little space to talk, but not a ton. Clarke seems kind of protective.

“You can have several BFFs. It’s like you’ve never watched My Little Pony.”

“I was watching My Little Pony before you were born.”

“So you should know all about friends. You like drinking, right?” he adds, to Nate.

“As much as the next functioning alcoholic, yeah.”

“Awesome.” He hands the phone back. “Friday?”

“This Friday?”

“I like to really jump into my drinking right away. You know, find a regular place, get a reputation as a lovable drunkard. That’s how TV tells me it’s supposed to work, right? Twenty-somethings have a bar where they hang out and drink unrealistic amounts.”

“We actually already have a bar,” Nate admits, glancing back at Bellamy for approval.

“Yeah, my ex-girlfriend is a bartender,” he says. “So she gives us discounts.”

“Your ex gives you discounts on drinks?” Clarke asks, sounding surprised. “Really?”

“What’s so weird about that?”

“I think most of my exes would charge me extra.”

“Bellamy’s got a superpower for staying friends with his exes,” says Nate.

“You should know. Bisexual,” he adds, at Clarke’s cock of her head. He jerks his chin at Nate. “Gay.”

He is kind of a great wingman, honestly; Nate should get him something nice.

“Wow, queer party,” says Monty. “We really do always find each other, huh?”

“We’re both bi,” Clarke clarifies. “What’s the bar you like?”

Nate’s kind of absently stressed about the whole thing for about twenty-four hours, until Monty texts a picture of a small, gray kitten, with the caption: Other important parts of being a twenty-something: new cat!

And then suddenly, they’re talking. It’s not quite as easy as it was in first grade, but that is what it reminds him of, someone looking at him, liking him, and just deciding they’re going to be friends. It shouldn’t work, really, not given how long it’s been since they talked, but by some miracle, they still like all the same things.

Which, admittedly, include video games, superheroes, and comic books, so maybe they’re just immature, but Nate likes to think they were ahead of the zeitgeist as kids. They’ve just grown into it.

So he’s not exactly stressed when Friday rolls around. Instead, it’s this kind of optimistic nausea, which isn’t exactly an improvement, but is at least novel.

Monty’s already there when Nate and Bellamy show up, and Monty greets him with another hug, like some kind of freakishly affectionate monster. Who hugs people that often?

“Hey, you came! Which one is your ex?” he adds, to Bellamy. “Will she give me drinks? How blessed are you?”

He’s still tucked against Nate’s side when he asks, and when Bellamy points Gina out, Monty navigates both of them to her.

It’s a lot, and, not surprisingly, it only escalates. Monty seems to consider hugs the standard greeting for friends, so Nate can’t even read into it; Clarke and Bellamy gets hugs too, and Gina once Monty starts to get to know her. Raven and even Murphy get hugs. Nate isn’t special.

But he wants to be.

Part of him can’t help wondering if it’s just some weird residual childhood fondness, or cultural programming, like Monty’s desire to get a cat and go to a bar every week. That same impulse makes Nate think that meeting Monty again like this must be fate, that he wouldn’t be seeing him again unless it meant something.

“Or he’s hot and you want to make out with him,” Bellamy suggests.

“Or you’re projecting because you want to make out with Clarke.”

“I think this is one of those situations where you’re both right,” says Gina. “Everyone can suck at emotions and be in denial. You guys are great at that.”

“I’m not in denial,” Bellamy protests. “I know I want to make out with Clarke.”

“And I just think there could be other factors at play here.”

“So, you’re saying you think you don’t have a crush on the cute boy who likes video games and went on a thirty-minute rant about all the pros and cons of the Runaways comic and its TV adaptation,” Gina says. “You think that’s not your type?”

Nate pauses, tries to think of any counterargument and comes up completely empty. “I’m just saying, maybe he’s not as awesome as I think he is.”

Right on cue, Monty shows up, shaking snow out of his hair, and hugs Bellamy and Gina before basically draping himself on Nate’s back.

“Hey, sorry I’m late! Clarke’s on her way too, she got caught on the train. Did I miss anything?”

“Nope,” says Gina, with a bright smile. “I think you’re probably the only one who didn’t.”

They’ve been doing Friday drinks, Saturday coffee shop, and playing a lot of Overwatch over the Playstation Network for about two months when Monty says, “We should take this to the next level, right?”

Nate chokes on his beer, but luckily Gina is with another customer and Bellamy, Clarke, and Raven are playing pool, so no one else witnesses it. “What?”

“You haven’t met my cat yet! Not in person. That’s weird, right? You definitely should have met my cat.”

“Really? Is that a known relationship step?”

Monty seems to be thinking this over, giving it more consideration than Nate really thinks it warrants, unless this is actually a good sign. In which case–

“So, what I’m thinking is, you know, once you’re at my apartment, and you see how cute my cat is and how many video games I have an all my awesome superhero posters, you’re going to be overcome with–I guess it’s this weird kind of combination of pity and horniness? Is how I’m picturing it. That happens, and then we hook up, and inertia keeps you doing it. That would be my big, master plan with this.”

He’s not drinking, so he can’t choke again, but–

“Wow. No, that’s really not how it would go.”

“No?” he asks, a little wary, and Nate realizes his mistake.

“I would have kissed you here, if I knew you wanted me to.”

Monty stares. “You didn’t know? How did you not know? I thought I was so obvious! Jasper could tell from like my first text message. I was being so unsubtle! Oh my god, you didn’t know.”

“Sorry?”

He’s laughing, at least. “Wow. I’m–wow. Okay. I’m even worse at this than I thought. But–”

“But I like you,” says Nate. “So can I come meet your cat?”

Monty grins. “I thought you’d never ask.”

The rest of the evening goes basically exactly as Monty said it would, except with less pity and more genuine affection. And after, when they’re lying together in Monty’s bed, Nate can’t help asking, “You know you were my first love, right?”

“I hoped so.” He yawns. “And I’m hoping I’m going to be your last.”

Nate’s heart flips over, and he tugs Monty closer. “Yeah. I hope so too.”

#spilling-my-soul

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hellyeahrpmemes · 7 years

Text

※ JENNA MARBLES SENTENCE STARTERS, PT. VII ※

here’s sentences from 10 more of jenna’s videos! feel free to change names/pronouns/zodiac signs/etc.! more jenna sentences

DIY WEDDING GIFT

“I just learned, don’t put lotion on your arms, and touch a poster, cause you’ll get lotion on your poster.”

“I didn’t get my own best friend a wedding gift.”

“And I was like, fuuuuuuuuuck.”

“If I was getting married, what would I want?”

“Give me some money, family and friends, to pay for this sick party I just threw you.”

“I can’t just hand her an envelope with some money in it and be like… happy wedding.”

“This is how you know someone’s your best friend. Because, when it’s their wedding day, all you can think about is fucking with them.”

“Side note, if you ever go to a strip club, and you make them a t-shirt, and you tip them in t-shirts, they appreciate the effort.”

“It’s gonna be the coolest wedding gift ever.”

“I have limited capabilities with what I can do today because I have to leave.”

“Why don’t you come join me in my quest for origami trolling?”

“She hated it, which is exactly why I liked it.”

“She’s sleeping in a bar. Not passed out in a bar, sleeping in a bar. Two very different things. One of them’s funny, one of them’s not.”

“Step one: this. Step two: fucky shit.”

“You… you welcome.”

“Oh, it’s falling apart… oh, it’s a bloodbath.”

“Oh my fucking god…!”

“That is what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“This makes me want to have a whole outfit out of money.”

“We blew it like twelve steps ago.”

“Oh, that’s looking cute as fuck.”

“Even though I fucked it up, this one is still so much easier than a t-shirt with a tie.”

“Regular t-shirts are okay, but t-shirts with a tie? Fuck. Never again.”

“I am pleased with this. This is adorable.”

“Bitch, how?”

“Um, it looks like shit…”

“Five dolla pants make you holla.”

“It looks hard. Pray for my hands.”

“I feel like I regret it already.”

“That doesn’t look anything like that cool Pinterest fuckin picture. This looks like shit.”

“Finesse em around? Do I look like someone who’s good at finessing? Cause I’m not!”

“It looks like absolute garbage, but, you know what, it gets the point across.”

“I don’t think that’s how the song goes.”

“This looks really hard, but this was so much easier than that fucking t-shirt with a tie.”

“Oh my god, that’s fuckin dope.”

“How did you do that?”

“I don’t know, I blacked out the whole time.”

“This is a shamrock that wasn’t worth it at all.”

“I mean, fuck with me everyone else at every wedding that’s ever existed.”

“That’s what friends are for. Fucking with you.”

“Um, see, it works.”

“She spent so much time folding that fucking money.”

“Do you feel congratulated or what?”

“Are you mad at me? Are you gonna kill me?”

30 LIFE LESSONS I LEARNED IN 30 YEARS

“It took me a solid hour of cleaning the whole thing to get the poop out.”

“I would give anything to read that group diary again.”

“A physical journal that you can look back on someday is something I would highly suggest.”

“Unless someone else finds it, in which case, you’re fucked.”

“Just take five minutes and buy a bath mat.”

“I just thought slipping and almost dying was part of my daily shower routine.”

“Just because you know something isn’t right doesn’t mean you can change the way you feel. That’s not how your heart works.”

“Sometimes, whatever seems logical isn’t the right decision, cause it’s not how your heart works.”

“It’s terrible, miserable, awful, don’t do it.”

“Never, ever, ever go on an all-carrots diet.”

“I was crash-dieting and decided I was only gonna eat carrots.”

“It doesn’t work, it’s disgusting, and it’s awful.”

“We would just sit there and take turns bitching about whatever was wrong with our lives.”

“Never say something behind someone’s back that you aren’t completely willing to say directly to their face.”

“When the person comes to you and says, hey, did you say this about me, as long as it’s something I said, I’ll say hell yes I did.”

“I do not shy away from confrontation. I’m a fan of it.”

“Sometimes, it’s necessary. Yeah, sure, people don’t like it, and sometimes, it’s “out of line” and “uncalled for”, but at least I said it to your face.”

“I used to be firmly on team ‘no new shoes ever’.”

“Is Jenna okay? Does she need money for shoes?”

“Just do it man, okay? You’re gonna hurt your legs and your feet, and then your back, and then your neck. It’s gonna be bad.”

“Maybe give our culture a little bit of time to catch up to how beautiful you are just the way you are.”

“You got a good butt.”

“I was never allowed to quit anything ever, you have to see everything through to the end.”

“I ran full speed, hit the springboard, and ran directly into the vault.”

“That is my done time.”

“Just move. Just pack up your shit, get in a truck, and move.”

“Just think of it that way, and it makes it a lot easier, and way less stressful, and not as crazy.”

“Don’t ever try to flush a pork chop down a toilet. Doesn’t work. Just trust me. Doesn’t work.”

“Don’t be ashamed of your human-ness.”

“Some people’s houses are too clean - I don’t trust those people.”

“You know what’s cooler than doing what all of your friends are doing, is not doing what all of your friends are doing.”

“I seriously considered doing it, until I was like, you know what, fuck that.”

“Fuck reading the dictionary, dude, I’m gonna sit here and space out. It’s gonna be a far better use of my time.”

“If you’re ever up really late, and have to be up really early in the morning, just sleep sitting up.”

“If you ever feel like you’re gonna pass out, make sure you tell someone that you feel like you’re gonna pass out.”

“Don’t just fall over. It makes people kinda mad sometimes.”

“I don’t know, I was blacking out.”

“I think it’s just the effort I appreciate.”

“Just take your whole rug and throw it out the window.”

“I learned this in college, where you literally get expelled if you don’t give credit.”

“Nothing about giving credit makes you look bad. If anything, it makes you look good, by citing your sources and having valid places to get information.”

“Don’t ever try a new sport if you’re severely hungover.”

“It’s gross. It’s not worth it. Just say you can’t go or something.”

“Always do the right thing unless it doesn’t feel right.”

“I saw that guy shove a bunch of beer down his pants.”

“You seem like you’re having a hell of a time, and I think the best thing for me to do is just keep it moving.”

“I like to lay down outside and just stare at the sky and think about nothing. Except aliens.”

“I’m a doctor now.”

“Doctors are just people with opinions. You don’t have to listen to them.”

“Sure, they’ve been to school for a whole decade or whatever, but you’ve lived with your body for your whole life.”

“Do I look like I fuckin wanna talk about it?”

“Always know which goals and dreams to pay attention to, and which other ones to just not pay attention to.”

“Hurling a large strawberry milkshake into an oncoming subway is something I dream about daily, but I’m not gonna do it.”

“Whatever choice you made in the past, you made the best choice that you could, given the circumstances at any possible moment you could make.”

I RANT FOR YOU

“The idea of bitching for someone else made me really excited.”

“Just take it easy, man, ya know?”

“If you hate it, tell me, and we’ll never speak of this again, just like lots of things I’ve done.”

“First of all, who the fuck has custom bunk beds?”

“If you guys wanna keep your privilege beds inside of your bougie room, you better start eating.”

“If this was fun, I’d invite my friends over, and charge admission at the door.”

“You know what takes up the most amount of my time is minding my own fucking business.”

“It seems like you can’t follow directions, which is out of my control.”

“You know what’s in my control? Doing jumping jacks with knives! Get fucked.”

“If you don’t find a new place to frick-frack I’m gonna cover my jungle gym in dildos, and the next time you frick-frack on it, it’s gonna frick-frack you back.”

“I’m gonna crash your band with my own band.”

“Fuck your band.”

“Ya nasty, ya phone is nasty, and ya life is nasty.”

“It’s like I’m living with idiots!”

“Fuck our vows, fuck our family, I’m out of this shit.”

“That’s so fucked up and wrong.”

I SUCK AT PRANKS 2

“Julien likes to prank me a lot. He thinks it’s very funny.”

“I tried one time, and it was terrible, but awesome.”

“The only way to get better at something is to try.”

“I wanna prank Julien, but I also love Julien.”

“What would you do for someone that you love in August? You would make it Christmas in August.”

“Good idea, Jenna, I like where this is going.”

“I’m aging myself, here.”

“Whoa, this is amazing, it’s like a wonderland in here.”

“I know, I’m so good at decorating, and also being resourceful, because I don’t have any money.”

“Hopefully, they’ll come out less shit than the last one.”

“Fuck you, YouTube tutorial, you just got your shit lit up!”

“In your face, Julien, what are you gonna do about this?”

“You know what this shape is called? Fuckin’ pranked.”

“I think I’m gonna wrap it up so that he thinks that I got him a present for Christmas, but I totally didn’t. He bought it for himself.”

“Fuckin’ pranked, fuckin’ got you!”

“If this prank doesn’t get Julien off my back once and for all, nothing will.”

“Nothing says don’t fuck with me quite like ‘I just made you a Christmas’.”

“Who is Santa Claus? Me. Don’t fuck with me.”

“Julien’s half-Jewish, so we should incorporate that somehow.”

“I’m running out of time, and it’s the thought that counts.”

“It’s lookin’ like real fuckin’ got you in here.”

“I found a wreath, and pulled the tree out of the garage.”

“Shitty Christmas about to happen…!”

“If I’m Christmas-ing, we’re all Christmas-ing.”

“Oh hell yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“What the literal fuck?”

“I’m gonna black out, what is happening?”

“Why don’t you come yonder into Christmas winter wonderland?”

“You like it? It’s Christmas.”

“Oh my god, this is magical.”

“Did I get you or what?”

“I didn’t wanna be disrespectful and light it when it wasn’t necessarily Hanukkah.”

“Come over here, look what Santa has brought you.”

“I bought this two days ago for myself.”

“You’re fuckin’ sick.”

“That’s a dead cockroach, that’s real…!”

“Just ‘cause he’s dead doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy Christmas…!”

“This is the thing dreams and nightmares are simultaneously made of.”

“I feel so pranked.”

“That was the most sensory overload I’ve had in, like, six years.”

“How long did this take you?”

“I can’t look at you…!”

“Do I suck at pranks? Yeah. But is my heart in the right place? For sure.”

“Don’t throw him out, he’s our friend…!”

“Nobody expects a Christmas prank in August.”

“Merry Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and stuff.”

HOW I USED TO DO MY MAKEUP

“I know what you’re thinking: Jenna, your face is terrifying!”

“I’m seriously down this rabbit hole, and I can’t get out.”

“I wanna be part of your beautiful people club, what the fuck.”

“It’s not like I could just go educate myself on how to do my makeup.”

“I had two books, and I just looked at the pictures.”

“It seemed a little ridiculous to put on a full face of makeup and then go play a sport later.”

“I was actually one of the most unmemorable people ever.”

“It kills me when I see these 9-year-olds with their Naked palettes crafting perfect little smokey eyes, like, what the fuck.”

“I didn’t exactly start off on a good foot.”

“This was look number one. It’s pretty good-looking, if you ask me.”

“I was not allowed to wear makeup.”

“Jenna, what’s on your face?”

“Mom, it’s not a big deal, okay? I’m in fifth grade, now, and I’m trying to get the boys to pay attention to me.”

“Why are you cockblocking me, Mom?”

“You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna smuggle in this pink lipstick and this blue eyeshadow, and I’m gonna put it on when I get there.”

“Jenna, I said wipe it off…!”

“Shit, my mom followed me to school…!”

“I mean, she had good reason.”

“I looked ridiculous.”

“It was a good plan…!”

“I was allowed to wear a little eyeliner and some mascara to draw attention away from my braces.”

“You’re late for second period.”

“I thought I was a real lady.”

“Are you laughing at me?”

“This was a choice.”

“I thought it was a good look.”

“You can’t see that, but you know what it achieves.”

“What the fuck, you could do this to your hair?!”

“I was also just reminded that this was a look.”

“That’s what I thought you’re supposed to do: when you get a palette of colors, you have to use every color in it.”

“I was too scared to try black. I was nervous.”

“Hey, you wanna Nair your stomach?”

“I was just doing it to be a good friend.”

“Dude, fuck yeah, fuck me up with it.”

“Holy fuck, fam, this is my new look.”

“Welcome, everyone, to my new face.”

“I looked like this for a few days at school until someone was like, what the fuck is wrong with your face?”

“I was in the other room, did you say ‘don’t cockblock me, Mom’?”

“The only time I could do it was in my room, alone.”

“I thought to myself: finally, I can be my true self.”

“Turns out there’s a time and a place for everything, and the place for this was college.”

“Fuck, you really don’t remember me, do you? Fuck, I’m so unmemorable.”

“I’m not a raccoon, this was a look…!”

“These are fucking dope.”

“Are you calling me a garbage lady?”

“They were ridiculous, and I did like them a lot.”

QUESTIONS VIDEO #6

“It’s been a rough few weeks for me.”

“I feel like my brain doesn’t work.”

“It’s kind of rude of me to be like, Julien, can you get the fuck out?”

“I think it’s time that I answer some questions for you.”

“If I could rearrange the alphabet, I’d put it on your butt… it’s good-looking.”

“A good line if you just wanna go in for the kill is you say ‘hey, you’ve got something on your lips’, and they’re like ‘oh, what is it’, and then you just go ‘my lips’ and then you just kiss them. Unless you think that’s too forward, in which case, don’t do it.”

“On our way over here, some lady woke up in the middle of the night and fell over in the plane.”

“I’m actually pretty scared of flying.”

“She’s fucking reading that little pamphlet right now? Like, that’s… what the fuck. No one does that.”

“I’m sorry that I like to be informed and educated.”

“If shit got real, I’d take the pamphlet with me. It says take nothing with you, but I would take that pamphlet.”

“This is a rule. You knew this coming in here.”

“I’m sorry for just being good at following the rules. I’m a rule follower.”

“Y’all are fucked up, y’all need Jesus.”

“I think I was just sort of an angry person for a while.”

“I think that’s what being an adult is: buying things that you hate, and also having to shut your mouth all the time, and bottle it all on the inside, instead of just letting it out.”

“He’s a tornado in the kitchen. He can make things in record speed, but it also means that he’s left out every ingredient that it takes to make it.”

“That is not the garbage.”

“I will also be sort of passive-aggressive about it.”

“Sorry for being alive. I didn’t realize I couldn’t be alive.”

“You forget that I have ears.”

“I can’t just explain things to you all day every day and why they’re funny.”

“You can use your imagination.”

“You can freak out the whole time, or you can just let it happen.”

“That makes a fuckin… oh my god, that makes a mess. What are you doing, that’s disgusting.”

“I don’t know why people like that so much.”

“I can see you. You guys aren’t that sneaky.”

“I’m not doing anything that you can’t do.”

“That was embarrassing. I’ll never do it again.”

“Hit me up. I’m here.”

“Just keep doin’ what you’re doin’.”

“Nobody knows what they’re doing. Welcome to being alive.”

“I have a weird aversion to taking anything that I don’t absolutely have to take.”

“One time when I was in fourth grade, we watched an animated movie about heroin, and I passed out.”

“You just sit up there, and you’re like, fuck with me, fuck with me…!”

“I don’t even know where I am or what time it is.”

EAR BLOOD

“The storyteller of our generation.”

“I have no idea what I’m doing, everything I’ve made is garbage, which is why I like it.”

“Step one: don’t touch the machine.”

“This sucks.”

“Which side of history do you want to be on?”

“I mean, this is a lot, but I like it.”

“How can I make this less loud?”

“I mean, that was pretty amazing.”

“Are you not entertained?”

“It’s got a touch of romance.”

“Here is my masterpiece so far.”

HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR CERMET 2

“There are so many more tips that I have neglected to share with you.”

“Thinking they’re being useful helps them grow.”

“They’re very sensitive and need emotional support.”

“Murdering their friends helps them grow.”

“It’s like trying to pet a fish.”

“They can’t go to Chipotle, don’t listen to them, it’s a trap.”

“Just kidding, they’re full grown.”

“Is it stupid? Yes. Does it make me laugh? Yes.”

“Sorry I look kind of like trash right now.”

JENNA’S RACHET FASHION BOUTIQUE: MY BOYFRIEND

“Close-minded eyeshadow people can leave.”

“Thank you for your prayers.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“I love the fabric store.”

“Every week, I make a giant mess in a different room in my house.”

“This could be a disastrous idea.”

“I can’t believe this worked…!”

“You’re a fucking genius, how did you do this?”

“Don’t do that, you’re gonna break it…!”

“You look like a little cupcake.”

“Deception: I’m so good at it.”

“Ooh, deeper, that feels good.”

“Define right spot; I don’t think anything about this is in the right spot.”

“If you can dream it, you can do it, Julien.”

“I think I’m a damn good-looking princess.”

“Stop doing that, you’re gonna break it.”

“It’s incredibly dysfunctional, while, at the same time, it looks good.”

“That should be my name: the tornado princess.”

“I could go to the ball, and wear this dress, but I can also fit a beach ball in the dress, too, so it’s like a double ball.”

“This is the only functional part of this outfit.”

“This doesn’t fit through doorways.”

“That’s like making a key that’s not compatible for keyholes.”

“Aren’t you booked for, like, a year?”

“You’re breaking it…!”

“Dazzle us, Julien. Be a princess.”

“It’s hanging on for dear life.”

ULTIMATE 100 COATS OF THINGS VIDEO

“I wanna do this, but I wanna do it hard as fuck.”

“Since day one, I did not come here to play games.”

“I’m not positive that all of these are going to work.”

“This couch will be ruined.”

“I think we all know instantly why no one has done that before. This is a terrible idea.”

“My face feels gross.”

“I promise you, on my life, I am not skipping any steps.”

“This is a very time-consuming process.”

“Let me bring you in nice and close.”

“I think it adds to the whole look.”

“This might be the day that my too much gene really is too much.”

“I look great…!”

“I need an adult…!”

“Someone send help for me…”

“That would suck. It wouldn’t be worth it at all.”

“This is starting to burn a little.”

“I did not cheat at all.”

“This is the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life.”

“It looks terrible. I hate everything about it.”

“I mean, a lot of my soul is dead.”

“This only came from a place of pure curiosity.”

“Do I look like someone who wants to hurt your feelings?”

“I fucking did it!”

“I hate everything else. With fury.”

“It’s the worst? Worse than this?”

“I don’t think I would wish this experience on anyone, ever.”

“I’m not sure if it can ever feel clean again.”

“Don’t do that, don’t do that, stop it.”

“This looks great and you fucking know it.”

“It wasn’t as painful as I thought it was gonna be.”

“It’s never gonna come off.”

“I regret everything.”

“I wanna take this whole day back.”

“It took me seven and a half hours for a very mediocre payoff.”

“I did it, I gave it my all.”

“I will never, ever, ever, ever do anything like this again.”

“I don’t know how I’m gonna fix my life — it’s permanently ruined.”

“We’re never doing this again, and we’re never talking about it again, either.”

#rp memes #rp sentence starters #roleplay meme #roleplay sentence starters #mine

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keshetchai · 7 years

Text

Posting a discussion here

It’s going under the cut because it’s a response to a response of a question @modularnra40 sent me awhile back. I’d prefer if other folks not reblog it (especially since this lacks the context of where we started this conversation), although if I get something wildly wrong and you happened to be reading, you can let me know.

@modularnra40 sent:

Thank you so much for your answer to my previous question! I'm definitely going to check out that book; it looks very good. I realized, reading your response, that I view religions as being comprised of two (maybe three) main interrelated but separate things:

On the one hand you've got the 'myth' parts of the religion - the stories, the 'what happened' stuff; and on the other hand you've got the 'philosophy' parts of the religion - the take away, 'what it all means' stuff. Those two things are deeply related, the myths teach the philosophy, and provide an entertaining and useful way to test the limits of it, or to experiment with it; and the philosophy is what we take away from those myths and what we go back to when we need to figure out how to respond to novel experiences in the world - but just distilling the philosophy doesn't work to teach it because of all of the nuance and context that the myths give. (The potential third part being the 'practices' stuff. The 'how' to myth's 'what' and philosophies' 'why') Like - the main philosophys of xtianity is typically something like 'forgive people' and 'be charitable' and maybe some stuff like 'human understanding is limited', but just /saying/ those things doesn't work to teach it - instead you've got the parables, and the Jesus story, and the rest.

Also, while both the myths and the philosophies are shared by the religious community, the myths are /more/ shared? Like - someone says 'this is how the story of Jesus goes' and they get the details wrong, that's an objectively wrong thing. Someone says 'this is what the story of Jesus teaches' is much less likely to be 'objectively' wrong. Though the shared philosophies are what end up being the most significant parts of a religious culture probably?

I realized I had this model because your answer kind of confused me at first - Like, obviously Judaism couldn't tell me anything about Jesus except that according to Judaism the dude super duper wasn't the messiah and such. But just because the myths can't directly inform each other doesn't mean that the philosophies have nothing to do with each other.

But the other side of it is that maybe it is very presumptive to say 'I want to read these religious texts that people have huge personal connections to and that mean so much that I can't ever /really/ get the feel for - basically the same way we read classics in high school english in order to analyze them and suck out their sweet delicious philosophical insides'.

Like, to flip the question - I don't have any problem with people viewing xtianity this way, or approaching the bible this way, but xtianity is a prosyletizing religion, and that power imbalance.

So - I'm poking at this whole model, trying to decide if I'm cool with continuing to use it now that I am aware that I have been. I think it's potentially dangerous - leaning too far into the 'seperation between myth and philosophy' thing could put me on some thin ice when it comes to not being a condescending dick about people believing in things that I don't. Like, to some people believing that Jesus literally existed is important and I shouldn't dismiss that. I’m also not super satisfied with the terms I've been using - I think 'myth' might seem too dismissive, like I think that these stories/histories are fake/untrue, and I think that 'philosophy' might be too secularish - I mean the meta-teachings, the guidelines that aren't codified practices and the lessons the stories teach the 'this is how you live well' stuff that's too complicated to have a simple step by step. Philosophy is as close as I can get to that in one word I'd love to hear your thoughts on this! I feel like I'm probably missing some important perspective on this - I can sort of sense the edges of where this approach might be considered offensive or wrong, but I'm having a hard time pinpointing it.

so I think your first, and primary assumption is not necessarily a terrible way to think of the general concepts of religion, but also I can immediately point out where that definition falls short in relationship to Judaism.

More or less what you outlined is:

story/myth* - philosophy - practice

Which is not bad, honestly. But also it’s fundamentally missing something, or at least I would argue that Jewishly it is missing something.

* I use “story” alongside your “myth” because I feel like “story” is more accurate than “history” and perhaps less loaded than “myth.” But I get what you mean.

And the thing it is missing is so fundamentally obvious that I know you will recognize it when I say it and you could even rightfully argue that it’s already right there!

But the important thing your model lacks is: People.

And to discuss Judaism you are discussing the Jewish people.

The story or myth of who, or what? The Jewish People.

The philosophy and purpose of who or what? The Jewish People.

Whose practices? The Jewish People’s.

Your three part overlapping model isn’t too out there or unusual. For example, I have a book I borrowed from synagogue that I thought would be fun to flip through. Its title is lengthy: How to Get More Out of Being Jewish Even If: A.) You are Not Sure You Believe in God, B.) You think Going to Synagogue is a Waste of Time, C.) You think keeping Kosher is Stupid, D.) You Hated Hebrew School, or E.) All of the Above!

whew. But basically the author, Gil Mann, also has a three-part model.

He positions the model more like this: Ethics - Spirituality - Peoplehood.

For the sake of similarities, “ethics and spirituality” are similar to your two prongs of “story-myth” and “philosophy-practice.” They all overlap, but Judaism requires peoplehood. Being Jewish gives you a set of ethics or practices that are required of Jewish people (whether or not you abide by them). Similarly, being Jewish means you have a shared Jewish myth or story of the Jewish people that is yours, either genetically or spiritually. Historically and religiously, this has also included a land which is the Jewish home. Such that the people of the descendants of the man called Israel are also all called Israel, and the people called Israel have a land also called Israel. Klal Yisrael means the people of Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael means the Land of Yisrael.

Which brings me to this:

just because the myths can't directly inform each other doesn't mean that the philosophies have nothing to do with each other.

Which is fair! But “philosophy” as “ the take away, 'what it all means' stuff.” is about what Jewish people are supposed to take away. The “what it all means” is somewhat less definitively answered - we’re not necessarily working towards the christian version of heaven or a beautiful afterlife, although hopefully there is a nice one. Or maybe there’s not one at all - it’s a bit besides the point. Our duty is to make a good world to live in here and now.

There’s a few major areas where the concerns of gentiles come into play:

gentiles who live amongst Jewish people in Israel (who should follow the noachide laws like don’t murder and don’t commit incest)

gentiles who convert and therefore are meant to be treated like every other Jewish person

gentiles who aren’t bound by Jewish laws or obligations or commandments, but will hopefully see the Jewish people as a “light unto the nations.” and if not, then (I guess oh well? we’re supposed to be good people regardless.)

which is to say to a certain extent there may be some general ideas about being a good person or righteous or kind - the ethics and morals bits - which translate across the divides. But the whys and how comes and the “For what reasons” must include “people.”

I think it's potentially dangerous - leaning too far into the 'separation between myth and philosophy' thing could put me on some thin ice when it comes to not being a condescending dick about people believing in things that I don't.

Possibly? I mean look the myth doesn’t have to be true or 100% factual to be worth something, I think the greater point people need to consider when trying to be respectful is that the story can valuable as a story, and I think you understand that part, tbh.

and I think that 'philosophy' might be too secularish - I mean the meta-teachings, the guidelines that aren't codified practices and the lessons the stories teach the 'this is how you live well' stuff that's too complicated to have a simple step by step.

hmm. well again “Ethics” might suit as a replacement, but I have to tell you, it’s pretty darn codified in Judaism. We don’t have just ten commandments, we have 613 commandments, there’s multiple books of codified laws and ethics, and volumes upon volumes of the law, arguments over the law, discussions about the law, and rulings about the law.

but then again, all those things are about being Jewish. if that makes sense?

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ghostsinthewoods · 7 years

Text

Bonus: Gregg and Bea Solve a Mystery

Early evening in Possum Springs. The sky was a sleepy orange, the setting sun poking out from behind a few scarce clouds. The weather was getting warmer. It was still appropriate weather for long sleeves and hoodies, but more and more people were just wearing t-shirts.

Not that Bea could appreciate the weather, really. She was stuck behind the counter at the Ol' Pickaxe. A whole day of moving tools, lifting supplies, and explaining different types of hammers to the customers.

They really needed to get someone else on the team. That guy Danny had worked for them for, like, two or three days before getting fired. Maybe Germ was looking for a job? He already helped out sometimes.

Bea almost considered if Mae might be interested, but she decided against it. She loved Maeday, but she didn't trust her around anything heavy and unwieldy.

Well, this was all stuff Bea could talk to her dad about. He'd been having a few good days recently. Bea would have been hopeful, but he'd had good days before. Without some sort of professional help, Bea didn't know if her dad would get out of the place he was in.

The bell above the door rang, and Bea already knew who it was. Mae stopped in to check on her friends every day. It was right before closing, so if Mae wanted to do something, Bea felt like she'd be down for it. She didn't really have any other plans.

But it wasn't Mae at the door. That threw Beatrice for a loop. Instead, it was Gregg. His expression was hard to read as he sprinted towards the shop's counter.

This was weird. Gregg almost never stopped in at the Ol' Pickaxe. It wasn't an unwelcome surprise, of course—she didn't hang out with Gregg that much, but she still considered him a friend. Still, something seemed wrong.

"Dude, the barn!" He said, stopping to catch his breath. "Burglars!"

"Okay, Gregg, I'm going to need a complete sentence," Bea said. "Also, hello to you, too."

Gregg seemed confused at first. He nodded, though, and waved. "Yeah. Hey. Hi, Bea. Hi. Someone broke into the Party Barn."

"Is it really breaking in considering it's abandoned?" Bea asked. "Because, if it is, then we break in there all the time."

"This is serious, Bea!" Gregg exclaimed. "They jacked our shit! All of our shit is jacked as hell!"

Okay, that was concerning. Bea knew that leaving the instruments in the Party Barn was a bad idea. It was a good thing she wasn't dumb enough to leave her computer in there. But now wasn't the time to say 'I told you so.'

"Have you told the police?" Bea asked. Almost as soon as she said it, though, she realized it was a dumb question. Gregg shared the same 'Eff the cops' mentality that Mae had. The antiestablishment fervor of middle class 20-somethings.

"If I tell the cops, they'll just say it was dumb for me to keep my shit in there," Gregg said.

"Okay, but it was pretty dumb," Bea pointed out.

"And that's why I'm not telling the cops," Gregg said. "I've already heard it from you."

Bea sighed. "Look, Gregg, I'm sorry. This really sucks. Is there anything I can do?"

"Yeah," Gregg said, "I'm gonna try and sleuth out some clues. Come with me. Let's be cops."

Bea wasn't even sure what to say to that. Over the few years she'd known him, Bea had never quite gotten used to Gregg's strange brand of zaniness. It seemed like every few days, he had something new to surprise her. This was one of those days.

"Okay, I guess I can help you look," Bea said slowly. "Should we, like, tell Mae or Angus?"

Gregg frowned. "Nah, Mae's doing something with Germ. And Angus has…" A look of mild disgust seemed to cross Gregg's face. "He's got family stuff."

Ah. 'Family stuff'. Now that she thought about it, Angus had mentioned his brother would be coming over for a visit a few weeks ago. That meant a visit to their mom. Bea felt her face contort into the same look of disgust that Gregg had.

"Alright," Bea sighed. "Let's go. I don't know what you're expecting, though."

Gregg grinned. "I'm expecting to solve a mystery, Beatrice."

The Party Barn seemed to never change. Ever since it had closed, and the supplies and furniture had been moved out, it seemed to be in a constant state of emptiness. It was like the pictures of abandoned building people posted online.

Well, it was an abandoned building. Most of the time. But whenever the band was in there, for a few minutes every night the building was full of music.

Tonight, though, it was only full of old confetti and two idiots looking for clues.

Bea wasn't entirely sure why she was there. It was probably just because she didn't really have anything else to do. It was a little weird that Mae had decided to just hang out with Germ without saying hi.

Then again, both Mae and Germ were a little weird themselves.

While Gregg searched around behind the Birthday Zone stage, Mae leaned against one of the support columns and lit a cigarette. Watching Gregg dig through the old streamers and decorations, Bea found it amazing that he had so much energy after a day of work.

"Oh, shit!" Gregg suddenly called out.

Bea raised an eyebrow. "What? Did you find something?"

Bea walked over to where Gregg was crouched down. She'd figured he hadn't found whatever clue he was looking for, and she was right. Gregg was pointing to the cement floor underneath the Birthday Zone stage. Graffiti of all sorts had been carved into it.

Gregg was pointing at a cluster of words in particular. 'GGG', 'KC', and 'MAEDAY'.

"Oh," Bea said. "I'm guessing this is something you guys did a while ago?"

"Yeah, when we were, like, 12," Gregg said. "For some reason, Casey thought it was cool for him to write his name as 'KC' back then." He shrugged, and then pointed to the three G's on the floor. "That's mine."

Bea blinked. She knew for a fact that those weren't his initials. "Why the three G's?" She asked.

Gregg smirked, as if he was holding in the greatest joke in the world. "They're the G's in my name," he said. "They stand for Gay, Gayer, Gayest."

Bea laughed. "You know, you're lucky your name has three G's in it. That joke wouldn't work if your name was, like, Lawrence. You should be thankful."

"I'm thankful that my name isn't Lawrence every day of my life," Gregg said.

Bea was contemplative for a moment. "So, like," she said, "I hope you don't think this is prying, but did you really know you were gay back when you were 12?"

Gregg didn't seem offended. He shrugged nonchalantly. "I mean, I almost feel like I've always known. Like, I realize there must have been a point in my life when I didn't know, but… I mean, I dunno."

Bea nodded. "Right. Sorry, I don't know why I asked."

"Dude, it's cool. Don't apologize." Gregg laughed. "I mean, I knew who I was pretty early. I feel like a lot of people probably go through life not knowing who or what they're into, you know?"

Bea did know. Some people, like Gregg or Jackie, figured out who they were fairly early. Meanwhile, Bea wasn't 100% certain about who she was. She was fairly certain she was straight. At least, she thought she was. But every so often, something happened that made her question that.

Now wasn't the time to think about that, though. Gregg continued searching under the stage. After a few seconds, he let out a triumphant cry and pulled something out.

"Check it out!" He exclaimed. "A clue!"

It took Bea a few seconds to register what exactly it was. Mostly because she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"That's a bong," Bea said.

"Sure is!" Gregg said. "Our culprit must've dropped it when they were nabbing the instruments."

Bea didn't even know where to start with that. For one thing, it wasn't an old bong. The green glass wasn't dusty, so it couldn't have been here for long. Also, while Bea wasn't very knowledgeable about weed culture, she somehow doubted that people just carried bongs with them all over the place.

"Levy probably knows whose bong this is," Gregg said. "If not, he can point us in the right direction."

"Then what?" Bea asked.

"Then, we nab 'em," Gregg said with a grin. "We bring 'em to justice!"

"Gregg, we're not cops." Bea pointed out.

"We killed those weirdos in the mine. We're basically cops."

"That's not how being a cop works," Bea muttered. "That's the opposite of how being a cop works."

Gregg rolled his eyes. "Whatever. It's a lead. Now let's go out to the Food Donkey and find Levy." He crammed the bong into his leather jacket. The top of the pipe poked out of the neck hole.

There was no way this wasn't going to end badly.

Bea wasn't in the habit of hiking out to the Food Donkey. If she was, she probably would have felt like the trek took a bit longer than it normally would. The whole way there, she was terrified someone would notice the green bong poking out of Gregg's jacket.

To her surprise, though, no one seemed to notice. Even in Possum Springs, everyone was busy with their own lives.

"So," Gregg said as they made their way past the Clik Clak, "you and Angus have been friends for a while, right?"

"Since, like, 8th grade, yeah," Bea said. Then, she chuckled. "To be honest, I was kinda surprised when you two started dating. Like, you're complete opposites in a lot of ways. No offense."

"You're really worried about offending me, huh?" Gregg asked. "Don't sweat it. He's big and cool, I'm small and scrappy. He's a super genius, I'm… Gregg."

Bea frowned, stopping in her tracks. Gregg stopped alongside her. "I don't think Angus would agree with that. You're smarter than you give yourself credit for."

Gregg laughed at that. It was a sad bark of a laugh. They continued walking along the black tar of the parking lot. The two turned the corner around the Food Donkey, making their way to the back. Bea was beginning to notice the faint smell of glue.

"Man, it's my second time seeing Levy in less than a week," Gregg muttered.

"Who is Levy, anyway?" Bea asked. She hadn't always socialized with the same people as Gregg and Mae. She'd known Casey, sort of; mostly through his reputation as a troublemaker. But Levy? Bea didn't remember anyone named Levy.

"Eh. If you don't know him, you don't know him," Gregg replied. "Thanks for coming with me, by the way. Kinda bored without Angus or Mae."

"I still can't believe Angus's brother makes him visit their mom," Bea muttered. "Like, I get he's trying to do be, like, a bigger person and all, but—"

"There's a lot about Angus's brother I don't get," Gregg said. "Let's leave it at that. I don't hate the guy, but… yeah. I feel like it'd be better if he just left Angus alone."

Bea didn't know if she entirely agreed with that. She'd met Angus's brother once or twice. Still, Gregg did have a point; he needed to stop dragging Angus along to meet with toxic people from his past.

They were behind the Food Donkey now. While the front was simply abandoned, the back was a mess. It was covered in graffiti. A pair of half-filled dumpsters were lined out along the back. Two people were huddled between the dumpsters, relaxing.

Bea recognized one of them. And she was very confused.

"Mae?" Bea called out as they approached the dumpsters.

Mae waved cheerfully at Bea, a smile on her face. "Hey, kids."

"Mae?!" Gregg yelled a bit too loud. "What are you doing here, Mae?"

Mae blinked. Her smile was replaced with a puzzled frown. "What? Dude, you told me to—"

"Hey, Levy, what's this bong?!" Gregg practically screamed.

The huddled up figure in the green hoodie looked up at Gregg. He looked like a mess. His eyes were baggy and lifeless. He looked like he hadn't shaved in months. Also, he smelled like glue. Like, really badly.

"Hey, Craig," he said. Then, he looked at Bea. "Hey, Steve."

It took Bea a moment to figure out that she'd somehow been confused with Steve Scriggins. She and Steve didn't look anything alike. How did you make a mistake like that? The guy was clearly out of it, but still. Weird.

While Gregg fished the bong out of his jacket, Bea exchanged a confused look with Mae. Her oldest friend could only shrug. It seemed like she was as confused as Beatrice.

"Hey, man," Gregg said, "we found this bong at the Party Barn. Someone stole our shit, and—"

"Wait, what?!" Mae blurted out. "The instruments were stolen? When? Who? Why?"

"That's what we're trying to find out," Bea said. "Apparently."

Levy, meanwhile, was transfixed on the bong. Well, not transfixed. But his glazed over little eyes were pretty focused on it. The stoner reached his arm up and wiped his nose off on his sleeve. Slowly, he stood up, and reached out his hand to take the bong. When he wasn't curled up with his knees to his chest, Bea was surprised by how tall he was.

"I saw a bong like this up in Bright Harbor once," Levy said. He turned it over in his hands with surprising delicateness. "Shit's legal there, man. Dunno whose it is, though. Sorry, Craig."

"It's Gregg," Craig said.

"Weed's legal in Bright Harbor?" Mae asked. "Whoa, wait, is that why you guys are moving there?"

Gregg stared blankly at Mae. "No, dude. I already told you why we're moving. It isn't for the weed."

"You don't gotta be ashamed, man," Levy said, handing the bong back to Gregg. "I'd move to where it's legal if I could afford to. You and your dude will probably have a lot of fun in Bright Harbor."

"Yeah," Mae said. "You'll have fun smoking pot and getting sheep tattoos."

At times like this, Bea honestly couldn't tell if Mae was joking or not. She sincerely hoped she was. Mae seemed to misunderstand a lot of stuff a lot of the time, though. It was like a weird gift she had. Although she wouldn't put it past Gregg to get a second sheep tattoo.

Gregg stuffed the bong back into his jacket. He had a serious expression on his face. In fact, it was a little too serious. Like he was trying too hard. "Look, the culprit left the bong at the scene of the crime. Can you tell us anything?"

Levy sniffed, pausing to scratch his nose. "I dunno, man. I mean, I'm pretty knowledgeable about weed culture, and I can tell you for a fact that people don't just carry bongs with them all over the place."

"Oh, hey, that's what I thought," Bea said.

Levy looked at her as if he'd completely forgotten she was there. He blinked a few times, and then continued. "Uh, yeah. Okay. Anyway, it might've been one of the folks off the train or something. I dunno."

"This is garbage!" Mae shouted, throwing her hands up into the air. Bea looked over at Gregg. She expected him to be similarly upset. Instead, though, Gregg had a much harder-to-read expression. Gregg's eyes flicked from Mae, to Bea, and for a moment he looked caught off guard.

"Extreme garbage, yeah," Gregg said. "Man, I'm so upset. I just wanna kick a tree." He nodded, slowly. "We should all go get pizza so I'm not mad anymore."

What was it with everyone in Bea's circle of friends and solving their problems with pizza? "I seriously think we should go tell the cops, Gregg," Bea said. "It might not be too late for them to do something."

Mae winced. Bea had a good feeling she knew why. "If you guys are gonna talk to the cops, I think I'll pass. I feel weird around cops ever since last year."

Levy nodded, seemingly in agreement. "Yeah, I don't like cops. I can't come with you guys."

Bea opened her mouth to tell Levy that this didn't involve him, so they hadn't really expected him to come along. But there probably wasn't any point. Levy seemed like he just kind of did things.

"We'll probably find some cops at the Clik Clak," Gregg insisted. "Anyway, we gotta carbo load if we're gonna report a crime to the cops. Need some cheesey pizza in our bellies. Cops won't respect us otherwise."

"Nothing you just said made sense," Bea said.

"Yeah," Mae said slowly. "But, I mean, all this talk about cheese has me all hungry for some pizz." Mae paused. "Er, I'm calling pizza 'pizz' now," she clarified.

"No, we all got that," Bea assured. She sighed. Why were her friends like this? She loved them, more or less, but still. It was like rounding up a bunch of children, and she and Angus were the parents.

No. Wait. That analogy didn't really work, because Angus was in a relationship with one of their adult children. This comparison was getting kind of gross. Bea decided to drop it.

"Fine," she sighed. "Pizza is fine. But if the cops can't find Gregg's instruments, it's you guys' fault."

Gregg threw up his arms and made a strange howling noise. Bea had heard him make it before. She figured it was some sort of in joke between Mae and Gregg. Either that, or Gregg thought he was a werewolf. Bea didn't think the second one was too likely, but Gregg was unpredictable like that.

Anyway, even if Bea wouldn't admit it, she was starting to crave pizza too.

"… And, like, at the bottom is the worst pizza, but everything else is still really good!"

The group had just finished eating their first slices, and Gregg was finishing up his explanation of the pizza scale. It had come up when Levy had complained about the pizza. He was fairly opinionated for a guy who'd followed them to a diner without asking.

To be fair, though, he at least had money to pay for some of the pizza. That was more than Mae could contribute. And she'd actually been invited.

Bea still wasn't sure why they were eating pizza instead of going to the cops. Sure, Gregg was a little impulsive, but still. Even Mae seemed a little on edge as she helped herself to one of Gregg's leftover crusts.

Meanwhile, Gregg was acting like nothing was wrong. In fact, he was fairly chipper. Out of the four people at the table, he was in the best mood, no questions asked. Mae was on edge, and Levy seemed just kind of… bleh.

"So," Bea said, trying to change the topic of conversation, "Gregg, you guys are going apartment hunting soon, right?"

There was an immediate shift in mood at the table. Gregg somehow got even more excited. Talking about the move always seemed to cheer him up. Mae, meanwhile, had an uncomfortable look on her face. She wasn't happy about Gregg moving; or, at least, she was conflicted. She didn't do a good job at hiding it.

Levy remained completely neutral as he ate a slice of pizza, crust-first.

"Oh, yeah. We're staying in some dumpy motel outside of town while we go searching." Gregg's eyes lit up. "Oh! You guys should tell me what you want! I'll bring you souvenirs!"

"I'd like some saltwater taffy," Levy said.

"Uh… I wasn't really asking you, but okay. I'll keep it in mind, dude."

"Do they have any places that sell, like, samurai swords?" Mae asked. Her mood had turned around a bit. Samurai swords tended to do that.

"Mae, I can't afford a samurai sword. If I could, the apartment would be filled with them," Gregg said.

"Oh." Mae frowned. "Alright, I'll take, like, a shirt, or whatever."

"I'm good more or less," Bea said. "You guys don't need to get anything for me."

"Oh, boo," Gregg said. "Live a little, girl. Jeez."

"Hey, I'm coming down, and I'm starting to realize you aren't Steve," Levy said, as if this was some major revelation. Actually, for him, it probably was.

No one seemed to know what to say to that. They just kept eating. Eventually, when they were done with the pizza, Mae spoke up. "Hey, Gregg," she said, "Why'd you tell me to wait for you behind the Food Donkey? I kinda wanted to avoid that place after last time."

That threw Bea for a loop, and raised a couple of red flags. "What?" She said. "Gregg told me you were off hanging with Germ or something."

Mae looked at Bea as if she'd just grown another head. "Uh, no?" She said. "I haven't even seen Germ today. He wasn't hanging out in the parking lot or anything."

Gregg wasted no time in changing the flow of the conversation. "So, Bea, how's the Pickaxe? Still killing you?"

Bea frowned at Gregg. "Don't change the conversation," she said. "Why did you lie about Mae hanging out with Germ?"

Gregg's eyes darted from Mae, to Bea. He looked nervous. Bea got the feeling that Gregg wasn't a great liar. That made sense; he was a pretty genuine guy. The problem was, Bea had no idea why he was lying.

Thankfully, Levy saved the day for Gregg by blurting something surprising out.

"Hey, so your stuff getting stolen reminded me of something," he said. "Did you guys know Possum Springs had a cat burglar in the 20's? Like, during Prohibition and shit."

Levy's sudden broaching of the subject distracted Bea from her suspicion. She'd remembered hearing something like this when she visited the historical society building back in high school. What surprised her was that Levy knew about it.

"A cat burglar?" Mae asked. "Like, the kind with a whip who flips through lasers?"

"Yeah, but it was the 20's, so the lasers probably weren't super-advanced," Levy said. "But back in the 20's, there were a bunch of dudes making moonshine up here. And I guess someone decided to, like, capitalize on that and steal shit."

"Whoa, that's cool," Gregg said. His nervousness was gone, replaced by sincere awe. "So, Possum Springs had some sort of weird super thief?"

"I mean, no," Levy said. "He stole shit for two years, but eventually someone living up in the hills shot him. Turns out he was some homeless dude from off the tracks. He buried everything he stole up near Possum Jump."

"Okay, I didn't know that part," Bea said. "Why'd he bury the stuff?"

Levy shrugged. For once, he didn't look like a stoner. He looked like a normal dude. A normal dude who happened to do drugs, but still. "I dunno, man. Shit's weird. Like, I think every town in the world is sitting on a crockpot of weird shit. And, like, if you dig deep enough, you'll find that crockpot."

"Wait," Mae said. "I'm confused. This guy buried crockpots?"

"I know a lot of stuff about weird shit in Possum Springs," Levy said. "Like, the Deep Hollow Hollerers, the town's secret society, Little Joe. It's all just interesting, you know?"

"I can kinda get that," Bea said.

"Yeah, Bea's a history nerd," Mae commented.

"I'm really only into history when someone dies or goes missing," Levy explained. "But that's, like, most of history, because most people die."

Bea blinked. "'Most people?'" She repeated.

"I don't know everything," Levy said.

That much was pretty obvious.

After dinner was done, it was time for everyone to head home. Mae had gone walking off on her own, and Levy had just sort of slipped away at some point after the meal. It was down to Bea and Gregg again. Since their homes were in the same direction, they were more or less caught in a conversation.

"Well, today turned out a lot more weird than I expected," Bea sighed. She was trying to light up the new cigarette she had placed between her lips. She was grateful it was staying brighter longer during the day. In winter and fall, when the dark came early, she sometimes had trouble switching on the lighter.

"I dunno," Gregg said. "I think by now we've all had much weirder nights."

Bea nodded. The orange flame sprung from her lighter, and soon the end of her cigarette had a healthy glow. God, she'd needed that. "Mhmm," she said. "I guess this night doesn't even rank in my top ten weird nights. Sorry we didn't figure out who stole your instruments, though."

"Oh, I did that," Gregg said casually.

Bea stopped in the middle of the sidewalk while Gregg continued walking. He stopped in front of her, and turned with a sheepish grin on his face. They were right outside the Snack Falcon; inside, a woman was frantically ringing up an insane number of bags of chips.

"What?" Bea asked. "Wait, so this whole thing was some stupid prank?!"

"No, dude," Gregg assured. "It wasn't a prank. It was a ploy."

Bea wasn't sure how angry to be. On the one hand, her time had been wasted. On the other hand, all she'd really lost was a few bucks spent on pizza. So, okay, Bea wasn't really angry. She was more… flabbergasted. That was a good word for it.

"Why?" Bea asked. "Like, seriously, Gregg. What the hell? I know you do a lot of wacky shit and get away with it, but this was really, really dumb."

Gregg chuckled, and shrugged. "I dunno," he said. "You and me never really hang out. I kinda wanted to, like, bond before me and Angus moved."

That caught Bea off-guard. She wasn't sure if that was sweet, or just really misguided. Probably both? Gregg was kind of misguided in general like that. Weird guy. "You couldn't have just asked me to hang out?" She asked.

"I got the feeling you'd, like, be busy or something," Gregg said. "I mean, if it wasn't for Angus, would you ever even bother hanging with me?"

Bea knew the answer to that question. She didn't really want to answer it, though. Gregg was a nice guy, she knew that. Despite her concerns about his relationship with Angus, she didn't have a problem with Gregg. But she and him were nearly complete opposites.

"So, I came up with a bogus emergency to get you to hang with me," Gregg said. "I stashed the instruments in my apartment, and set it up so we'd run into Mae because I knew you'd hang out longer if she was around."

Bea blinked. "How much thought did you put into this?"

"I mean, as much thought as I put into other things," Gregg said.

That didn't really explain anything.

"Okay, Gregg," Bea said, "I get that you thought that this was, like, a fun, quirky thing, but if you stop to think about it, it was kind of manipulative."

Gregg stared at Bea blankly. Then, a look of realization spread on his face, followed by an expression of shame. "Oh, shit," he said. "Yeah. Wow. This was kind of not a great thing to do, huh?"

"Yeah, like, I'm glad you want to be better friends, but if I didn't know you, Gregg, I'd punch you right in your jaw," Bea said.

Gregg nodded slowly. "Jeez," he muttered. "Yeah, sorry, Bea. I don't know why I do things sometimes. Like, I just get ideas, and I wanna do them. You know?"

"I kinda got that impression," Bea said. She could feel herself calming down a bit. The cigarette was helping. Plus, Gregg was genuinely apologetic.

"Tell you what," Bea continued. "Next time you want to hang out, maybe you could just ask me. And maybe don't ever pull a stunt like this ever again."

"Don't gotta tell me twice," Gregg said with a laugh.

And he never, ever did.

#night in the woods #nitw #nitw postgame #nitw fanfic #ghosts in the woods #gregg #greggory lee #bea #beatrice santello #mae borowski #postgame #bonus story 1

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cookinguptales · 7 years

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Omg with TokyoPop 😂 Please share the early 2000's anime days this is new to me and sounds hilarious.

they were dark-ass times, my friend

TERRIBLE AMERICAN PUBLISHING (idk how it was in other countries; I went to Paris many years later and was impressed with their...everything when it came to different kinds of comics but) Tokyopop which was basically run by people who only half knew what they were doing, Viz which mirrored manga for a long time bc they assumed Americans were too stupid to learn how to read the other way (which was particularly annoying in comics where like a right arm or something was important), ADV which probably couldn’t actually release an entire series if their goddamn lives depended on it (yes, I’m still mad about MaLoki), and various other publishers that would publish like one title ever

No legal streaming!! Which meant you either had to buy super expensive DVDs or pirate them online. (BACK IN THESE DAYS, CRUNCHYROLL WAS A PIRATING WEBSITE. NEVER FORGET.) This was right at the end of VHS days, though, so it could be worse!! If you got a VHS, it would be subbed or dubbed. When I watched Evangelion it was on bargain bin VHS tapes so it was like 70% subbed and 30% dubbed and it was a painful time.

Fansubs online were a huge thing. Legit companies had pretty slow turn around (you were lucky if something like the Anime...Network? I can’t remember. or Toonami or Funimation picked it up, bc they had tv channels -- though you’d usually have to put up with a shitty-ass dub) and you’d usually have to wait for a large-chunk release. If you wanted to watch something as it aired, you had to watch it raw or depend on fansubs. These were uh. Of varying quality. They’d usually have a 2-24 hour turnaround depending on the size of the group, with Shounen Jump titles having the fastest turnaround. Those were anime that were already published in manga form in the US via Viz, so they were already mostly familiar with how they’d go, plus...lbr, a lot of those shows were....easier to translate. If you catch my drift. (They tended to be dumb and repetitive. That is what I’m saying.) Also a larger fandom, so greater pool to get workers from and a greater reward re: downloaders. (And people usually torrented new fansub releases bc there were fewer online streaming sites, so popular shows downloaded faster.)

So like, picture if you will, a group of tween-teen nerds sitting around a computer watching fansubs of suspicious quality and shrieking the theme songs in unison because a fansub wasn’t a fansub without bouncing karaoke at the top. We got a DVD player that could play avis at one point and that was kind of mind blowing. Otherwise, you could use an AV cable or buy a DVD.

You bought things legit if you wanted to really support the industry or you really loved a show, not because they were always better quality. I’ll leave it at that.

There were also a lot of scanlation communities, which were basically fansubs but for manga. These were also of extremely variant quality, and there were a lot of rules for a very weird online translation subculture. I always kind of got the impression that most of them hated each other. A lot of these groups required IRC use, which was confusing af, and I honestly believe that’s the biggest reason why most of these ended up getting put on online manga reader sites. There were fewer of those back then.

Most anime fandom was very strongly demarcated. Most of the fandom I engaged with was on livejournal, which meant it was like...maybe 95% female. You’d get more men on forums, which is why we all fled the forums and went to LJ. lol. Trash spaces. Trash.

The whole yaoi/shounen-ai/BL situation was very different. LGBT stuff was considered more niche and still something you needed to “warn” for in most environments. For a long time, the only legit published stuff was like. FAKE and Gravitation and CLAMP and maybe Eerie Queerie or Loveless or something. So basically, it was shit. lol. (As a young teen, I was particularly attached to CLAMP/Kaori Yuki stuff. Thank god my parents never caught on.) Anyway, to get to scanlated BL works, you usually had to go to special communities/sharing circles online or figure out the prominent scanlators and follow them. Very, very little doujinshi was scanlated. Very few (English-speaking) people ventured onto pixiv. There were a lot of arguments about the differences between yaoi, shounen-ai, and BL. Don’t let anyone nowadays fool you. When I was a teen, 90% of all “yaoi fangirls” were queer, and half of that annoying sex-focused excitement was because it was the first gay sex we’d seen in any publication anywhere. It was a different time in the media landscape. BL has a lot of shitty-ass tropes, but we were basically starving in a desert. We took our Gravitation and we liked it. F/F manga was very rarely translated, and I guess that’s still the case today. There’s less of it, and I think we’ve all been trained to prioritize male sexuality. (Plus most of the shoujo-ai that got posted online was like uber-innocent schoolgirl stuff.) People make fun of “yaoi fangirls” and “fujoshi” and all that now, but I can honestly say I would have never understood my own sexuality without that subculture. Like the anime clubs were full of obnoxious little weebs, but let’s be straight about something, no pun intended. They were full of obnoxious little gay weebs. People are all about gay (western) cartoons nowadays, but when I was a teen, they were all about that anime.

Because almost all published anime/manga was in hard copy, you’d get mini congregations of fans in stores. See: hordes of manga fans sitting in the manga aisle of the book store, fans chatting with each other in...suncoast, or wherever they could find DVDs/VHS. The level of social skills in these areas was...not high. Also, a lot of fuckin creepy predatory dudes going after girls. Hooooly shit. I was so glad when they started releasing anime/manga online. Y’all livestreamers on Crunchyroll don’t know how good you have it. You used to have to deal with the fedora bros who were a good 10-20 years older than you but still following you around in stores, conventions, etc. any time you wanted to get new stuff. Like it was a legit problem.

LIKE I’M TRYING TO CONVEY HERE THAT JUST GETTING ANIME/MANGA WAS A PAIN IN THE REAR END. not as bad as the dark days when people had to physically mail each other shit, but it was still definitely a subculture and you’d definitely be thrown in with a lot of people you wouldn’t want to be around. (Similar to how things are in modern western comics fandom...)

Fandom itself was basically a tire fire. In every possible way. Like I’m nostalgic for it in some ways, because in some ways I really miss how text-based it was. There was a lot more meta and conversation, and fanfic was much better supported. Comment culture was a lot stronger and you’d become friends with people who read your work and/or people who wrote stuff you liked. But on the other side of that, there was a lot of weird fanfic gatekeeping. Sporking communities and flaming and fic rating communities were much more of a problem back then. You release stuff to crickets nowadays, which is demoralizing, but back then there was a solid chance you’d wake up to an inbox full of hate mail, especially if you wrote slash. It definitely happened to me a few times as a kid. I think they really targeted teens, too. So writing fic could be shitty. There was less fanart in American spaces, too.

I do agree that to some degree things have gone too far with the whole virtue-signaling/issuefic thing, with a lot of people yelling very loudly about things they may not always understand very well, but you gotta understand. Fandom was a hateful place in many ways back then. Sexist, racist, homophobic, you name it. Female characters are still ignored now, but they’re typically treated less horribly than they were back then. People try to be more educated about other ethnicities and sexualities and such now. You’re less likely to get bullied because you were gay. I think the big problem is that sometimes people hijack important movements to be giant dicks, and a lot of people, especially younger people, get swept up in that.

There was a very specific kind of anime badfic back then. I could write literally an entire post on that. Like god. Where do I even begin??? The bluenettes? The super kawaii fangirl nihongo? Script fic? “Tell me what to write next!” fic? lolololcrack fic? I mean, there were a lot of varieties of suck back then.

Weird subcultures. Like...really weird ones. Things got kind of cult-y relatively often. Just say no to cults.

if you want more details on anything, I’m having particularly painful flashbacks right now. ugh, the free hugs signs.

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talinthas · 7 years

Text

Diversity in gaming, but with a happy ending

With all the talk of diversity and representation in games I need to share an awesome story, because there are more than enough negative stories to go around.

So the former punter of the Minnesota Vikings is a gent named Chris Kluwe. We became acquainted at PAX this year over a shared love of magic, and have spoken about a game he was creating, which involved deities from different pantheons fighting. Now, that set off some alarms for me, because it has historically not gone well, you might say, as it always ends up being a bunch of dead or highly marginalized pantheons and Hinduism, because something about having many gods and lots of colorful representations makes folks think they have the right to use the tradition like a public domain comic book or something.

(This is a pretty long post, more below the cut)

Kluwe came to me because he WAS including Hinduism (sigh) and wanted me to vet the art and make sure it wasn't offensive or whatever. I agreed, because hey, maybe I could at least stop anything egregious. He sent over a rather lovely picture of Vishnu and some stats, and I sighed again and offered some notes about hand placements and whatever. But I appended to my reply a question- did he just want me to look at the art, or did he also want my honest opinion about what he was doing?

And i'll be honest, it took a long time for me to be able to actually write even that query, because as a person in a minority community, you become accustomed to having your culture and traditions becoming someone else's toy, and you learn to sigh, and suck it up.I pinged a lot of people i trust to ask their opinions on how to breach this topic, and i eventually did. Kluwe, to his credit, immediately replied yes he wanted to hear everything i had to say.

this is what i wrote--"But here's my personal bigger issue- the other deities you're using are from effectively dead pantheons. Barring reconstructionist groups, there aren't a ton of people worshipping the Greek or Druidic or Norse pantheons right now. Hinduism, on the other hand, has something like 600 million followers. And Vishnu is an immensely popular god, worshipped in some form or another by about a third of those people. I'm not sure what message it sends that you're lumping in an actively practiced faith with these other faiths from dead civilizations. This is basically the Smite problem all over again, where that game took a bunch of dead pantheons, and then one very much living one, and turned it into a MOBA. And when living practitioners complained, the devs replied with that lame old chestnut of "well my hindu friends totally like it" etc etc.

The thing is, it's kinda dehumanizing to see your faith turned into a toy. Its not about disrespecting the faith, cause whatever who cares, as much as telling the believers that their tradition is not worth a ton more than the iconography it provides, and not equal to any western traditions, which are subconsciously afforded respect. Consider- how many games do you see using Abrahamic traditions? Even atheist game designers tend to shy away from using stuff from Christianity/Islam/Judaism/Baha'i/whatever. It's a subconscious bias that stems from old school colonialism- the brits are monotheists, so anything less is barbaric, etc.

Now, i'm not accusing you of anything, and i think your game looks hella cool and i can't wait to play it! I just think that you should perhaps reconsider using Vishnu as one of your characters. If I may offer a replacement, draw on the older Vedic pantheon instead. The Vedic culture is what gave rise to Hinduism and Buddhism, and features a vast pantheon of Gods that are still spoken of in the Hindu tradition, but aren't worshipped or revered the way Vishnu is. Indra, for instance. King of the old gods, drunken reveler, wields a lightning bolt, rides an elephant and all that. He's an old Indo-European god that is from the same source faith that gave us Zeus/Jupiter/Thor. Pretty cool dude. Alternatively, if you want the more Law focused side of Vishnu, there's Varuna, the original chief deity of the Vedic pantheon (before being replaced by indra, who was then replaced by Vishnu and Shiva). God of the oceans and the Law, focused on oaths and the truth and the like, and worshipped everywhere from India all the way to the Mediterranian. He's attested in Hittite literature even. Name comes from the old Indo European "Oueranos", which is the same as Uranus in greek! Also, the cult of Mithra-Varuna became the mystery cult of Mithras that the Romans followed, giving rise to a lot of the iconography borrowed by early Christianity. The reason we shake hands, for instance, is because that was how worshippers of Varuna swore oaths with each other.

At the end of the day, it's your game, and I'm not trying to stand in the way of someone cool doing something cool. I'd just humbly suggest that maybe there are other options which would suit your needs better than Vishnu, and certainly save you a lot of headache later on.

I hope this helps, and if there's any other way I can be of assistance, please let me know. "

---

And Chris, to his immense credit, basically said thank you, that's exactly what I wanted to hear.

I checked the KS again today, and i was blown away that not only had he changed the god, art and everything, but made an update explaining why.

This is so rare that I don't think i've ever actually seen it happen, and I pay a lot of attention to cultural use in gaming. Just mind blowing. Hopefully the tides are finally turning, and game designers will realize that their potential audience is the entire world. Here's the game if you wanna check it out. I'm still just kinda stunned.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/567823005/twilight-of-the-gods-age-of-revelation

#diversity #hinduism #happyending

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prettyuncool · 6 years

Text

The truth I would say on dating apps.

Being an 80′s kid who’s been in a relationship for most of her adult life, I now feel like the mother of Goodbye Lenin who awakens from her coma: no freaking idea how to deal with dating apps. I tried a few and lasted just for half an hour each. I had fun in Alienation Nation, but I probably wouldn’t live there, you know. My pictures suck, everybody’s pictures suck, everyone’s craving for some validation and how the hell do I even know you’re interesting with those few lines of bio available. It feels like the startup Pecha Kucha pitch of your own Flesh & Mind™, just as finely organized as in a supermarket shelf. I confess I also had some troubles finding any relevant shit to write about myself. The last time I’ve inquired about my own identity so thoroughly I was a teen and the last time I thought I’d use my identity for romantic-marketing purposes was actually never.

So I spontaneously thought we might be very close to a world where we should want to directly pursue what we eventually get from online networks, i.e. disconnection. I’ve imagined the non-dating app for happily staying away from each other, where everybody markets their worse flaws in their own bio’s. I wrote mine too. And then realized it was uncool anyway, because I don’t have a spectacular sense of self-unworth the same way I don’t have a neat sense of self-worth. Damn.

So I thought about the pure, raw truth. And ended up writing a shit-ton of stuff. I’ll share it with you below. Now, find me an app where I could honestly say it. And maybe some equally awkward matches, too.

---

I am a wanderer. An astrology nerd. A flea market enthusiast. A gingerbread addict. I am a listener. I own an acoustic guitar which I can't play, but it's nice to have guests who play it sometimes. I love Primitivo wine. Also coffee - but I don't drink it, because it makes me freak out. So let's say I love who loves coffee. Black. No sugar. And craft beers. And dark chocolate. I find this shit so sexy! But it makes me feel sick. So I love it in others. Talking about difficulties we're attracted to, huh? I enjoy moody, underexposed photography. Most kinds of it. I'm too broke to own a proper camera, though. Nevermind. I love weird, indie movies. Bollywood cracks me up. I used to be a decent backpacker. I roamed a lot around Europe. I've been told I have a strong accent from Chicago. That's weird, I've never been there. I find marvels in little things. And in big things, too. I am left-handed. I practice meditation, when I can.

I find sciences and arts equally mesmerizing. I'm a serious meteoropath. I may cry over beautiful things. Like sunrise and kindness. I listen to jazz when I cook. Or Bossa Nova. But I'm a terrible cook. Wild strawberries are my favorite fruit. I never find them around. Normal strawberries make me happy, too. My perfume is Hypnotic Poison by Dior. I never change it. I work in advertising, in the creative department. But I feel guilty about it. I also did cognitive research for a while. Now I may start teaching semiotics of advertising at the University of Italian Switzerland. I find Switzerland majestically boring. But I have sweet memories of it, too. I'm both a cat and a dog type. Yeah, I'm an indecisive person. I often tend to overthink. And also underreact. I used to self-harm. My favorite color is yellow. My least favorite sex positions are cowgirl and reverse cowgirl. I never feel a thing when performing them. But I'm fine with most of the others. Men often tell me I look shy at first, but then I'm surprisingly and overwhelmingly sexy. Dude, I have no idea. I'm sure shy when it comes to singing. So I'm not comfortable at karaoke's. I live in Italy, but I have several dream places: Cape Verde, Morocco, Bali, Pakistan, Canada, Oregon, India, Patagonia. I am slightly obsessed over flower essences. There are so many of them! If I fail at my job, I can become a Reiki practitioner. I could actually already do it. I don't regularly swallow cum. Anal sex is fine, as long as it doesn't last too long. My shortest relationship lasted one month and a half, my longest one lasted 14 years. I am attracted to different types of people, with typically recurring features: resilience, emotional agility, curiosity, general culture, effective problem-solving skills. But I am also attracted to more superficial shit, like beards and travel experience, driving ability, cooking skills, basketball playing skills, good taste in wine and stuff like that. I used to fall for rebels, now I just find them funny. I've had several crushes, but fell in love only twice. Both of them used to smoke the same brand of French cigarettes. Curious coincidence. I find emotionally unavailable people ridiculously unworthy of my attention. I have experienced death, illness and loss of loved ones. So I value people's ability to suffer quite greatly. I've never got pregnant, but I used plan B twice. I'm not on the pill, so wear a fucking condom. Tash Sultana's music makes my soul vibrate wild. Other than that, I'm into intimate acoustic indie pop/folk and various kinds of dreamy tunes, more or less. I have unresolved mother issues. Some unresolved daddy issues, too. Whatever. I'm working on it. I definitely can't draw. And my sense of orientation sucks. I am also generally unimpressed by trends. This makes me feel so old. I am often uncomfortable around kids, but deep inside I love them. I may want to become a mother one day, but now is just not the right time. I'm neither a morning person, nor a night one. Let's just agree I'm fucking lazy. I'm a playful type, who may look codependent in love. But I normally lead a very independent life. I wouldn't call myself jealous, either. Yeah, lucky you.

I have a weird fascination for ex-Soviet republics. I wholeheartedly enjoy sex, but I've also experienced sexual harassment and some abuse. So please, be mindful. I love French, Indian, Japanese, Lebanese and generally Mediterranean cuisines. Saffron is probably my favorite spice. I'm a social drinker. I used to smoke weed, but stayed high for four days in a row every time I tried. That made me feel miserable! But if you smoke, that's fine for me. I am a feminist, but I wish it didn't make sense to be one. My sexual orientation is often under debate. I've never had a doubt I liked men, but I sometimes also had crushes, physical attraction and some intimate experiences with women, too. This doesn't always happen, though, so I honestly don't know if I should label myself as bisexual. Frankly, I don't really care. l'm 5'28" and weight about 106 lbs. I have no STD's, genetic illnesses or physical disabilities. I'm myopic, if that counts. My family has a history of breast and cervix cancer, though, so I should be careful. I was born premature, three months in advance. I love reading as much as I enjoy writing. I used to collect crystals, but then I stopped. They're too expensive and often fake. I'm slightly more extrovert than introvert, at least according to personality tests. That's because I'm curious and inquisitive AF. Other than that, I'm pretty quiet. Also easily overstimulated. I've been raised catholic, but I don't recognize myself as one. I deeply respect spirituality in others, though, and I'm craving a religion that makes sense to me. I believe political orientation is mostly a matter of historical and cultural context, but I may have troubles speaking with you if you support any type of institutionalized human submission over others, in any possible world. I also strongly believe that Truth is never relative, but opinion is. That was unrelated, but I find it super fundamental anyway.

I don't consider myself special. I am a very average person. I find peace on sandy beaches. And I love collecting shells from the shore. It reminds me of my childhood.

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communist-cat-girl · 7 years

Text

Ok So

im on my shit again cause pragerU is still makin fuckin’ videos time to yell about PragerU - The Least Diverse Place In America

(0:08) They had me in the first quarter, im not gonna lie, i thought this would be some interestin social justice piece and that maybe prageru’s obvious racism and ignorance were instantly solved by this Charlie Kirk guy. I was so wrong.

(0:28) Okay because there still totally isnt racism on college campuses or anythin’??? and like a ton of misogyny??? that isnt addressed at all??? ever??? but sure dude okay, lets act like colleges are good and perfect.

(0:46) So this is just ... I mean he sounds like an idiot who did zero research already but here we go. Can’t wait to have a straight white guy tell me about queer acceptance.

(0:59) Umm no not at all, people will still forever be homophobes and transphobes and every other phobe on the block. Also who the fuck signs a consent form for sex? They’re not doing kinky shit they’re caricatures of a man and a woman kissin’. Also seriously dude? Experimenting? This isn’t the fuckin’ 80′s, we know people are gay for sure and that people know full well what the hell they’re doin’. Experimenting is the way straight people have been disenfranchisin’ actual gay feelin’s for ages and this dipshit is perpetuatin’ that while tryna’ claim that these issues are “been there, done that,” as if anythin’ is solved. Fuck you already Charlie you clearly don’t know what the fuck is goin’ on in the world.

(1:04) If I had a dime every time I heard some conservative asshole talk about this in relation to safe spaces alone I think I’d have enough money to pay for my tuition. Barely.

(1:10) Ye, that thing racists, homophobes, and straight up nazis try to say is an issue because of us nasty liberals. I know the phrase and I know you’re boutta’ spew some bullshit about the first amendment, hit me already.

(1:21) ... Have you been to a college campus ever dude? Seriously, this is an honest question. I don’t even think hes been out in the real world if he thinks conservative ideas are radical or that colleges shut down “diversity of thought.” They shutdown bullshit because bullshit questions don’t need to be asked.

If a nazi asks “Why don’t we kill all Jews?” We do not attempt to explain to them the immorality of genocide nor do we explain to them their ignorance for thinkin’ that Jewish people are somehow the issue in their lives instead of their own mediocrity. We ignore them and move on, as we should. Because they’re fuckin’ idiots.

(1:25) You mean society, right? All of society does is indoctrinate you into a specific way of thinkin’. College isn’t special in this, every single region, culture, and subculture, even on accident, will attempt to indoctrinate you to their way of thinkin’, that’s just how it works naturally. We learn and grow from new experiences and interactin’ with different people, it’s an incredibly important part of our growth. College is an incredibly diverse place where we can do that!

(1:36) I don’t know if you know what’s up politically but people on “The Right” like to defund schoolin’ and bash on our teachers for no reason. So yeah ... they’re gonna’ be more left leanin’ considerin’ who their enemy is when it comes to literally makin’ a wage high enough to pay rent and eat food.

(1:46) ‘Cause no conservative signs up ‘cause they know their antiquated ideas will be shutdown in two seconds because colleges are, often, forward thinkin’ institutions that want to include many different people as they possibly can instead of lettin’ some white middle class straight cis asshole tell other people what to do???

I’m not even overeactin’ here, every experience in college i’ve had with a white conservative man who is my superior has been hellish and degradin’, it sucks. You give assholes power and they become bigger assholes, it’s how it works dude.

(1:59) What kind of conspiracy theory bullshit are you talkin’ ‘bout. No one’s paycheck depends on victims ‘xcept ... well no one. Ever. In the history of everthin’.

(2:10) My core being is superficial to you? What the fuck dude? My pride in bein’ an Italian American, Wiccan, liberal, demisexual, polyamorous, transgender woman is important to me, it’s at the very core of who I am, not some superficial mask I put on. What I am is what I fuckin’ am and that shit that makes me a unique individual is important. Fuck you Charlie.

(2:13) What!? What the fuck!?

How is glorfyin’ who someone is at their core superficial and how is it destructive? Who hurt you Charlie? Who told you that positive feedback and kindness and love is harmful?

(2:16) The only thing destroyin’ real learnin’ is a) people bein’ willin’ly ignorant to honest to the gods facts and b) the fact that republicans are defundin’ education like a mother fucker.

(2:25) a) We’ve all learned from Shakespeare dipshit. He was a surprisin’ly forward thinkin’ man for his time period and wrote what is considered to be some of the greatest works of art in the western world. b) Who isn’t readin’ Shakespeare cause he was a white man? I still do, I enjoy his shit. I know plenty of other queer people who enjoy his shit. What are you gettin’ at here?

(2:34) N- ... no it doesn’t dude. I’m literally a queer woman on a college campus. I am accepted into a group despite my transness and ethnic background. Everyone, black, white, asian, and so forth, speak to each other with respect. Genders, while not treated equally by the old, conservative staff, all get to say what they want and are given equal value in conversations. I live in Texas, not a very liberal place, but I still experience more acceptance and confidence than I ever did with even my parents.

This is clearly bullshit right wingers pull to split apart people in the left by claimin’ that our actions somehow divide us even though, if recent protests and counter protests held by the left against the right proves anythin’, its that our differences unify us. Unlike all of you middle class cishet white asshats.

(2:42) No.

Even ignorin’ my experiences, I’ve never heard a single issue with liberals excludin’ other liberals. It’s always conservatives who either exclude or get pissy when their radical ideas get them excluded. Same with radical liberals really.

(3:03) Has it? Also does that matter? The issue is that we have a stupid amount of people in poverty and a stupid small amount of rich people who are stockpilin’ money that is ruinin’ our economy.

Look I actually like capitalism as a concept, I also like communism, and socialism, hell I even like a monarchy or a tribal system where chieftains and elders hold votes. These concepts (both the economic and ideological ones) on paper are all perfect and good and do more harm than good.

The issue is that in practice, here in America, capitalism is ruinin’ lives as we speak and is goin’ to lead to an international crisis sooner than later on both an economic and environmental level. Capitalism, as it stands, is unsustainable, and our stance needs to change.

(3:06) No? When? Can you give me an example because if you mean places like Cuba or China or North Korea or the Soviet Union those were all communist regimes that acted more like dictators than representatives of their people. Real ass communism hasn’t really been done outside of small communes. People are just too power hungry for their own good, the only difference with capitalism is that their avarice is given praise by the masses.

(3:14) Do not act like we alone made some kind’ve ever lastin’ peace. Do not act like we haven’t instigated violence in the Middle East like it’s a fuckin’ game of Hearts of Iron IV. We, as a nation, are warmongers at worst and war profiteers at best.

(3:21) Because as well all know poor people do not commit crimes because they’re poor and aren’t given a way out of their shitty economic situations no no no, they do it because they’re black and play the victim card.

And of course slavery didn’t both ruin the lives of millions of people by makin’ them and their descendants poor and underprivileged, black people are poor because they choose to be violent and lazy. Obviously.

[/Sarcasm]

(3:29) Maybe because they’re wrong when they say this shit and we don’t want old ideas that don’t work or are objectively wrong or based too highly on subjective thought.

(3:37) I think Trae Crowder said it best when talkin’ ‘bout the nazi bullshit in Charolettesville, “They’ve been losin’ battle after battle, fight after fight for 200 years in this country and these are their death rows.”

Your stupid ideas are fallin’ off, the reason you have a voice right now is because you’re gettin’ desperate and so are the old rich assholes who are afraid taxes will empty even 1% of their fuckin’ pockets who give you the money to even exist.

(3:34) And that’s what they do! And we look at what people on the right do and we all cringe because it’s stupid! We’re not all closeted entitled fuckin’ rich kids goin’ to ivy league schools on our parents dime! We know what the real world is and it’s fuckin’ tough and scary and everyone is pitted against us. We know these things. Dumb fuckin’ bitch. I’m seriously tired of this guy right now.

(3:50) ... ... Did this dude not think we know what liberal means?

(4:12) Noble goal, I wish the rest of America would adopt this kind of “Melting Pot” idea, we’d prolly have way less issues honestly.

(4:25) ??? Why are you mad that people are bein’ kind and decent ???

(4:31) Thanks for usin’ actual terms in an attempt to disenfranchise them of any real meanin’. The same shit is happenin’ with the word triggered so y’know, not really a new tactic. Also one that doesn’t work on changin’ minds. This entire channel is an echo chamber I swear.

(4:35) Wow he’s ... stupid huh. The words mean what they mean asshole. Maybe ask one of your queer friends? You’re diverse in thought, right? Oh wait no your diversity of though doesn’t take queerness into account. Because you’re an asshole.

(4:52) ... No.

Like literally no, where do you get this idea from? Other liberals do not think like other liberals, there is infightin’ in EVERY culture, includin’ college campuses you fuckin’ dipshit.

I’m sorry I’m mostly just callin’ him a dumbass cishet white asshole middle class piece of shit but I’m really pissed off with his willful ignorance.

(4:54) No, it’s not. The two things do not compare.

(5:01) You mean what queer, black, and many other disenfranchised people have been doin’ for ages? Okay.

(5:12) No. Shit.

Video over. I want to die. I hate this dude so much.

#q slur #b slur #rose rants about bull shit #again

0 notes

avalidpoint · 7 years

Text

An open answer to a question about classism...

Specifically, a Facebook status that a friend of mine posted asking: “In America, it's never just about class, and I'm so sick of white men trying to frame it that way. Why are people so obsessed with drilling things down to a single cause when that's almost never the case?” You know the drill. I wrote a super-long comment and didn’t want to clutter up his space, so I wrote it here instead. Simple: it's one of the few instances of social inequality that affects them - or could affect them - directly. And I'll give them this much: it often affects white men in a very specific way, because privilege comes with an expectation of success, and patriarchy demands that a man must bear himself in a certain way. (that good ol' patriarchy-enforced burden of "you *must* be the breadwinner, you *must* be successful, you *must* work yourself into an early grave, you *must* prove yourself, etc.") Classism, and the negative byproducts of capitalism, hurt other groups too, obviously. However, American culture reserves a very special type of poison for the poor in general, and the "head of the household" is generally supposed to drink more of it. Here in America, if you're poor, it's your fault - and the blame must start with useless ol' layabout Dad. Sure, he might've been laid off after developing a pain disorder due to poor working conditions at his job. Sure, he might have been prescribed pain meds and became addicted to them... but it's all his fault anyway because the patriarchy demands his sweat to grease the wheels of capitalism and he was unable to provide it.

Granted, most of the dudes who actually say that "class is the only thing that matters" are academic types who are so far removed from that scenario, they might as well be on a different planet. However, if they live and work in academia, they might have noticed that class is the *one* thing student/faculty activist types *don't* like talking about, since - quite often - they didn't exactly grow up poor themselves, and they know on some level that *their* status has a certain amount of class privilege to it, and it makes them reeeally uncomfortable. They'll bring it up in connection with race, and gender, and so on, but *almost never* on its own. The rich kids only bring it up as a way of admitting their own lives and privileges, and the poor white kids don't bring it up because, well, this is America, shame on you for being poor. Also, it *can be seen* (for good reason, mind you) as appropriating oppression, or "talking over" marginalized folks. And while that’s super frustrating when you’re listening to a queer woman of color talk about how she was almost kicked out of school for holding her girlfriend’s hand on the class trip to Paris, and your family couldn’t even afford to send you on a class trip to Paris, Texas, but you can’t bring it up because it’ll look like you’re “talking over” her or invalidating her pain... I can still understand her reaction, because there are way too many white boys out there acting like they’re the real oppressed ones and - unfairly - you’re just going to look like one of those idiots. Yeah - modern day “liberal academia” doesn’t have a lot of room to talk about classism. That sucks. The real problem is, though, that Americans are bad at talking about classism in general. It’s considered rude to discuss money, or how much you make at work. We’re more generally awkward about poverty and the attending shame it brings than we are about anything else except maybe sex.

Not only does that breed resentment in these mostly-privileged-except-for-class-maybe white guys because they feel like they aren't being listened to... it also means that sometimes, um, they're actually not being listened to. Hence the fable of the unemployed blue collar factory guy from Cleveland who's about to be evicted from his house, and meanwhile some college kid is yelling at him for wearing an Indians cap and telling him to "check his privilege." Is that a total strawman example? It is. I made both of those people up. But for a lot of people, that scenario *feels* very real, and it ain't too far off from what often happens on Facebook when people from two separate political bubbles cross paths. You’ve seen it, and so have I. So yeah: of *course* they're going to shout "It's all about class!" People who *should* be on their side keep slapping them down for even bringing *up* class, and the prevailing attitude in this country has always been that it's impolite to talk about money, which is an attitude that benefits capitalism so damn hard that it probably explains at least half of the gender pay gap (we’ll get back to that in a second.) In that environment, shouting "it's all about class!" must feel downright transgressive. Problem is, of course, it's not *all* about class. Remember how I mentioned the gender pay gap a second ago? There’s some who theorize that it has to do with women being less willing to ask for raises or be forceful in negotiations. We’ll talk about the underlying toxic masculinity of the modern work environment on another day, but... isn’t it interesting how a) women are raised to be more polite than men, which leads to b) not speaking up when they might be up for a promotion or a raise, which leads to c) making less than men. Let’s think about step “A” for a second, folks - why, exactly, is *not* bringing up money supposed to be polite? You know who benefits from that? People who want to pay different people different wages for the same job, that’s who. There. I found a concrete, real world example of how sexism and classism intertwine to create a scenario where someone’s wages are effectively stolen from them. See? It’s not just about class, and classism exists. Boom. I win. Look, kiddos: racism and sexism and homophobia and so on existed before Adam Smith ever put pen to paper, so you can't pin everything on the evils of capitalism. Yes, class matters more than some people on the left think it does. Yes, sometimes it's actually a privilege enjoyed by the person who's yelling at you to "check your privilege," and they don't seem to know that, and yes, that is fucking ironic. Yes, classism is inextricably linked to racism and sexisms and all the other -isms. But all those other -isms exist, too, and they also have a very real, very destructive impact on the lives of... well, everyone, really, but mostly people who aren't "white guys." So, yeah, if you take your typical white boy "privilege of not knowing what women/PoC/LGBTQ+ people go through", but you mix in the *very real* oppressive effects of capitalism (and he *does* know what *that* feels like), and *maybe* - if you're being really kind to this guy - you add a cup or two of "capitalism benefits from division and resentment, and the hierarchal structures that keep women from full equality are essentially the same ones that keep Average Joe Whiteguy strapped to the grindstone 60 hours a week, so - technically - classism, sexism, racism etc. are all branches on the same tree," (like I said, if we're being *really* generous, we'll give him that one) - that's how you get the "It's All About Class, Stupid!" concept. Problem is, like most reactionary white boy ideas, it's about 40% "wow! you're so right!" and 60% "wait... what? Fuck off!"

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