#deluded themselves into thinking it was real or meaningful

[yourtongzhihazel]

I stg that "bitches will be like 'voting pales in comparison to my strategy firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a walmart" tweet has made any attempt at discourse around revolution and the status quo fucking impossible because as soon as it starts some shitlib pulls out that thing not realizing how bad it completely misunderstands basically everything to do with communist thought

Like okay for one that's no communists actual belief system!!! That's some dumb anti-civ extreme anarchist bullshit it has nothing to do with the prominent strands of Marxism!!! And for two it's just a massive fucking cope to enable libs to delude themselves into thinking that doing no real political action besides voting a few times per year is equivalent to actual meaningful political action when it just isn't!!! God I fucking hate liberalism

Liberalism just can not stop inventong ideas in abstract and then hastily plastering it over the real world. They keep erecting straw person after straw person then striking them down.

"All we can do is to laugh as we gaze at this spectacle, for one cannot help laughing when one sees a man fighting his own imagination, smashing his own inventions, while at the same time heatedly asserting that he is smashing his opponent." - J. V. Stalin

To liberals, there's only two forms of political participation. Voting (submitting to the bourgeoisie) and adventurism (a symptom of their deeply rooted individualism) neither of which are participation in politics nor are in any way, shape, or form effective.

#death to the usa #i fucking hate liberals #hazel's press releases

[sepublic]

            The Owl House is about many, many things. It’s about neurodivergence, weirdness, not fitting in and being left out. It’s about finding a community of others like you. It’s about being your own person, but also wanting to be a part of something, and balancing these seemingly paradoxical things. It’s about how everyone is alike and similar to each other, but also each person is wholly unique and irreplaceable.

         Everyone has their own story, we all think we’re special or more better in some way than the rest. There is no destiny, but people have the power to choose and decide for themselves. We can all mess up and do something wrong, but what truly prevents us from getting better isn’t circumstance, it’s the refusal to improve; Just deciding to do so and taking that first step forward is all you need to begin.

         It’s about disability, about not fitting up to a certain standard and that’s okay, even if you’d also like to do that. It’s knowing what you’re good at and discovering that, and it not having to fit other people’s definitions of what’s meaningful. It’s about learning and loving and doing things for their own sake, not as a means to an end, it’s about the value of art and how it makes us humans.

         We have powerful relationships with stories. They can heal us, inspire us, motivate us. But they can cloud and delude people, set them down paths of arrogance and solipsism. Stories mean a lot, especially to the neurodivergent, to those who fit in, and it can be seen as cringey or too much, too overwhelming, but no those feelings are valid, even if people must be responsible about how they express them. Stories can do so much for us, but they aren’t everything either; Reality is just as important and necessary to engage with.

         It’s about different ways of thinking and learning, of doing things, and how they’re all valid. Different existences, diversity, a wide variety of experiences, and how could you want to make the world smaller by making it more monotonous? But you must approach differences with respect and understanding, it’s exciting to engage in something new, but you must be the difference between a colonizer and an immigrant. It’s a defiance to conformity but a reminder to mind others around you. Be kind, for even if others take it for granted, compassion does well in the long run.

         Sometimes kindness won’t work for some people, but ultimately we must counter Christian ideas of retributive justice, guilt, and punishment in order to prioritize healing and rehabilitation. Restorative justice is what will build the world back up, let it heal. There is no fate, no greater God or will, it’s just people interacting together, sometimes trapping themselves in a cycle of their own making, but still people.

         People aren’t above nature, nor are they separate; Do not seek to control or tame others, be it that you don’t understand and assume foreign, or those you do notice commonality. You can’t make people do things, only yourself, but you can give them the freedom and support to decide better. Forgiveness is not mandatory either, if you truly want to do better. You are not the hero and that’s why you can forgive yourself for not fixing everything on your own.

         Co-exist with nature, with different things and their own ways of existing, instead of trying to justify them as a natural resource to exploit. It’s about environmentalism, sowing seeds for more to come, instead of just taking. It’s about a cycle of kindness where you put things in and hope what comes out, the next generation, does even better for you; Rather than a cycle of pain where you spread and project that, and refuse to acknowledge people for who they are.

         It’s about people overlooked in real life; People of color, the queer, the neurodivergent. It’s about non-conventional family structures, found family; The bonds we make and choose, because things don’t have to be given to us at the start of life. We can earn and build it for ourselves just as much, if necessary.

         There’s perception, learning to trust in your own abilities and those of others. Learning to be positive about your body and its appearance and alleged shortcomings. It’s about seeing people for they are as a whole, not something you whittle and simplify them down into. Parents want the best for their children, but they were children once and are just as flawed and messy as the rest of us.

         Accept change, accept things even if they’re bad, like death or disabilities, because sometimes you just have to learn to live with it. You can’t hide in an insincere fantasy, hollow and bereft of substance; Make real connections and experiences. But you can also strive for things to be better, and you can recover. Wounds heal, even if scars might linger.

         Chance can cause anything, you can never be too certain about what comes your way, how people will impact you, and you’ll impact them. It’s how people live beyond death through the influence of their actions, and that is more alive than any failed resurrection or clone. Give freely, just because others suffer less than you, doesn’t mean they should suffer at all. Be the change you want to be, take initiative.

         People wander around, searching for homes. People are cast out or lost, but find new places to belong. Nobody deserves to be in a cage, nor lost. We’re all seeking for those connections, pre-existing or to be made. Some places you won’t fit in, some people won’t accept or be interested, and that’s okay because there’s always someone out there.

         It’s about wanting to be special but also understood, for people to see and learn about you in good faith, to give you the time of day. It’s reciprocal love, about healthy boundaries in relationships. You are more than what you do for others, and locking them out to deny your pain will only hurt them in the long run, too; To love yourself is to love others. It’s okay to be selfish and even angry, it doesn’t have to come at the expense of others, and sometimes you have to prioritize yourself over those who do you harm. Wanting things isn’t inherently harmful to others and can co-exist with wanting things for others too.

         Think critically, question what you’re told, come to your own conclusions. Defy binaries, things aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive nor paradoxical. Don’t settle for singular choices, it’s the fine yet real line between indecisiveness and openness. Let people try new things while giving them the space and support to back out or change their mind. Friendships exist between generations, among them, kids deserve to have other kids as their friends, and mentors.

         It’s about how the loss of a parent leaves you alone and grieving. Wondering about them. How they can impart a final gift onto you, something to revolve your whole life around because it’s your world and it’s them. Grief can manifest into betrayal over feeling abandoned; Or a desire to honor and live in their name. It’s hard to say goodbye and find the right words, language can affirm so much.

        It’s about the ordeals of growing up and coming of age, realizing how terrible or difficult things can be, but confronting that instead of retreating to emerge stronger. History changes but also repeats itself, the cycle renews. 

        Fiction and reality have a divide, but they can intersect, or invade one another. It’s about making things real, while recognizing when they aren’t. But fantasy is an example of what could be, and that’s the hope that inspires a kid to keep moving forward. People deserve a chance and that’s why judgment should be reserved, as we’re all still making mistakes and learning.

        It’s about connecting with the world around you, both the people and the place itself, and loving and understanding them both for who and what they are. It’s about finding a home, which can be many things, as long as it makes you feel like you belong. That’s why it’s called The Owl House.

#the owl house #themes

[the-rainbow-lesbian]

the small group of blackpilled lesbians on radblr get talked about all the time and I see so many osa radfems trying their absolute hardest to drive them off radblr yet this energy is never used when it comes to racists and homophobes/lesbophobes. like radblr hates the mean lesbians so much but they’re all too happy to reblog/interact/be besties with racists and lesbophobes. Tbh I don’t even like the blackpilled group & think some of the stuff they’re doing is absolutely disgusting but why is that a bigger problem for radblr than women who actually have systemic privilege over some of us being racist/lesbophobic like 🧍🏿‍♀️

because radblr is a fucking joke and it’s more of a social club than any tangible feminist movement and like that’s to be expected because this is tumblr and we are all anonymous and it doesn’t take a lot for someone to put “radfem” on her bio and suddenly we make assumptions about who she is and what she believes, but hostility towards lesbians and woman of color is not unique to this space unfortunately and anytime you try to call it out it’s just “drama” and “infighting” because these women don’t want to engage in any meaningful way with other women in a way that helps them reflect on their own views and actions, instead they martyr themselves “woe is me I have been burned at the stake like a heretic for being a straight woman” and I just roll my fucking eyes because you know this person has no intention of actually being an ally to other women, open themselves to challenging world views and possibly engage in any feminist meaningful action. and where is that meaningful feminist action anyways? radfems are already a small group of women and mainstream feminism is just rebranding the patriarchy to make it seem appealing. it’s true we would face a lot of opposition but so did every feminist movement that forced real change for women’s rights.

honestly anon, I am afraid. women in the west might have been deluded into thinking they achieved a post-feminist world (because women who suffer the most specially in the sex industry are carefully made invisible) but it doesn’t take a lot for our rights to be taken away like Roe v Wade, specially when men are becoming increasingly more violent when they are not guaranteed a wifemaidmother like before where women had no options but to rely on men. everyday they are getting radicalized with the most vile rhetoric and we just pretend that it’s not happening and I am worried by the time we do wake up to it will be too late. so yeah I am so fucking exhausted of seeing “radfems” complain about nonsensical thing like “stop being heterophobic 🥺” they don’t care about themselves and women in their own countries let alone women in the global majority unless they want to fake admiration (Asian feminists) or pity them without doing anything meaningful, worse even using them to shut us down.

#sorry I went on a tangent lol

[incarnateirony]

Jensen's first real concert, of course his friends would wanna be there. That’s just normal. Idk why antis think it’s so incredible. Do they not have friends at all?

It's not even just antis. There's a bunch of pissy hellers that also deluded themselves that they had meaningful access. And generally, yeah, they tend to have con-relevant information about con-relevant things. Or when actors get REAL TIRED of everyone missing the point, they'll whisper something to the first known rumor monger so it gets out there on purpose. But right now everyone's deeply offended that they weren't personally informed Misha Collins attended a concert as a non-job function.

[radioactive-earthshine]

24 with BartKon for the writings prompts?

24. “The first time you smiled it felt like the universe aligned.”

This was a lot of fun to write.

On AO3.

Enjoy.

Notes: Bart struggles with writing his own wedding vows on the eve of his wedding. He enlists Wally to help.

1600 words.

. . .

The wedding was in exactly 19 hours.

After one year of planning, and 3 months of actually working on said plans, where days turned more and more frantic between hero-ing and cake-testing, the wedding was technically final. 

Tuesday, fit for tux at 3pm. Fifteen minutes later, sock Firefly in the jaw. Go back to the appointment; cancel order entirely. Tux too stuffy. Rebound on plans and refine. More casual. Beach wedding.

Flowers? Check, that one was easy. Local florist. 4.6 stars on Yelp. 

Were they changing the wedding colors again? 

No. 

Yellow and turquoise. Not blue, turquoise.

Their favorite colors. 

Wednesday, cake-testing with four bakeries 10am, 1pm, 3pm and 5pm. Between each appointment stop bank robberies, drownings, pickpockets, evacuate people from burning buildings and sock Captain Boomerang in the jaw. 

Settle on bakery #3, they asked for their pronouns. Were they changing the cake? 

Absolutely not. 

Coconut sponge with pan-flag pride “funfetti” sprinkles, passionfruit filling, orange creamsicle frosting in a gradient that started orange then bled into yellow then turquoise. A Hawai’ian sunset.  

Destination Wedding, O’ahu, all their closest friends and family were going. Lex sprung for renting out an entire beach and handling security so they could be themselves without fear of compromising their identities. 

Okay, Lex sprung for everything once he sniffed out that they had considered just getting married in Vegas by a Superman impersonator. 

Or was it a Batman impersonator? 

No, it was Mr. Miracle. 

Bart wouldn’t have minded having Scott marry them in flair and flourish on the stage of one his flashy shows, or even if it was just in his backyard and Barda roasted a whole hog and they just said they tied the knot privately. 

Kon would throw the bouquet right at Orion without context and he would catch it out of instinct. Scott would convince him that the tradition meant he absolutely had to marry Lightray within one month or Bart and Kon’s marriage would be cursed per Terran tradition. 

Well, it was at least one ruse to try and get Orion around to finally doing it after over 300 years or however long they had been together. 

That would have been alright by Kon and Bart. But Lex got wind of the (potential) plan(s) and put an immediate halt to the inclination and they got around to thinking about things that were more meaningful to them. 

Hawai’i. Their friends. Their memories shared among them all that led to this moment.

Funfetti. 

Being married by Wonder Woman herself, and they didn’t even need to ask her. She approached Bart and asked him for the honor. How could he say no? 

Kon told him he would have been an idiot to say no. 

Everything seemed finalized and Bart looked over the manifest and schedule that had been printed out and checked over by Kon earlier. Kon approved it. 

Bart double-checked it. 

Perfect. 

Everything was done, scheduled, paid for and where it needed to be. Their wedding was going to be small, meaningful and fun for everyone. 

Well, there was one thing that wasn’t done yet and Bart felt a very real panic cloying at his chest. 

Through all their planning, through all their manic days and careful decisions, Bart had not taken the time to write his wedding vows yet. 

“I’ll get to it later,” he kept telling himself. “I’ll write them tonight,” he lied when he passed out immediately on Kon’s chest. “I’ll have Carol and Helen help me!” he deluded himself as he got pulled into a waltz lesson by Martha Kent. 

19 hours, and he would be married. 

Bart had rarely felt true fear for himself, but in this moment his hand was literally shaking as he came up with nothing but blanks. 

Thank god Kon was spending time with Roxy tonight in some Hawai’ian bar living up the old days so he could not be witness to the fact that Bart forgot probably the most important part of the whole damn thing. 

Kon’s vows were already written, and they were tucked in a yellow envelope, wax-sealed. 

Kon started working on them months ago and kicked him out of the house a few times when he was working on them. 

That should have been a good lead in for him to start actually writing. 

Biting his lip, he leaned back in the hotel chair, slapped his hands on his face, and slid them down groaning dramatically and then swearing in interlac. 

He was in trouble. 

He desperately needed help. 

Bart grabbed his phone and texted the only person he knew that went through something similar. 

Wally. 

Bart II: Hey. I need help. Badly. Come to the hotel room please? I’ll pick up your patrol around Keystone and Central City for 6 months if you do. 

He really meant it too. 

The knocks on his door couldn’t come soon enough and Bart didn’t even care that he tore the door open before the third one came. 

“Woah,” Wally blinked when he saw Bart’s strained red eyes. “Are you okay? Don’t tell me you and Kon fought. I’ll kick his ass if he-” 

“No! No, it’s not that,” Bart held the door for Wally and closed and locked it behind him. 

“Are you sure? You look like you were crying, you can be honest with me,” Wally said as he took in the full suite. It was nice, nicer than the hotel room he had with Linda. But the table Bart had commandeered was a wreck with paper. 

“Well, maybe I was cryin’ a little,” Bart admitted as he sort of shuffled back to the table and slumped down, taking a single sip of pepsi from a crystal champagne glass. He never got the taste for alcohol unless it was drowning in sugar.

“That pepsi?” Wally opened the fridge and found the honeymoon champagne that had been set out for them untouched. Bart nodded. 

“You know I don’t like alcohol, and Kon doesn’t like champagne, he’s a pina colada and martini guy. Help yourself to it,” Bart grabbed his pen and scribbled wildly in the corner of the page, so wildly it carved through the paper and into the table leaving an even gouge. “Ah grife!” 

“Woah. Woah. Let’s just calm down,” some alcohol might actually do that if they didn’t just burn the effect immediately with their metabolism. Wally brought the champagne over with a spare glass and sat down. “Tell me, what’s gotten you so riled up on the eve of your wedding?” 

“I haven’t written my wedding vows yet…” Bart was defeated. 

Wally put the champagne down and stopped trying to get it open. “Well. Shit.” 

“Yeah, hilarious. I know.” 

Wally shook his head. “I don’t think it’s hilarious. I was freaking out about that too.” 

Bart looked at Wally at his admission and it made him feel better. “Yours were so… nice. I couldn’t tell you were freaking out. Linda was crying when you read yours.” 

Wally smiled as the precious memory came to him and reached over to grab the paper Bart had written on a little. “I sat down and wrote it all out the morning of the wedding.” 

That made Bart’s jaw drop. “You wrote a vow that was near movie script worthy just hours before your wedding?!” 

“It came from the heart, and it was all true. Every single word of it. I just thought about Linda and everything she means to me, and everything I wanted to be to her, and how I imagined my life with her would be. It just came flowing after that and fell into place. But damn, leading up to it, that was the hard part,” once a speedster started moving, they were moving. Wally looked at the first little sentence Bart had begun to write and he smiled movingly. 

Wally read it aloud. “Kon.The first time you smiled it felt like the universe aligned.”

Bart brought a knee up to his chest and rocked a bit. “It’s the only sentence I know for sure about.” 

“Because it’s true, right?” Wally slid the paper back to him. 

Nodding, Bart took the paper and flipped it back so he could try to write. “The first time he smiled I saw literally stars and I felt like the dissonance in me shut up for the first time ever. You ever meet someone and you just know you are supposed to know them? Kon was like that. My soul was just like… There you are! I’ve been looking for you! And I didn’t even know it,” Bart smiled softly and he looked a little less haggard. “I feel like that every morning now. There you are! I need you!” Bart stopped when he noticed Wally was leaning on his elbows, chin in his palms, listening to him. 

“What?” Bart sat upright. 

Wally huffed a little laugh, lifted himself up and popped the cork off the champagne. “I think you wrote like half of your vow right there. It’s good. Kon’ll cry, he’s so emotional.” 

Bart recalled everything he said and his chest felt warm, his cheeks turned a soft pink as he thought about his soon-to-be husband. “Yeah… Yeah he will. I love him. He is the one person I don’t mind losing to, because even if I lose I still win.” 

Wally poured himself a glass of the ivory champagne and topped Bart’s glass with pepsi. He brought his glass up and clinked it casually with Bart’s. “I think you’re going to do just fine, Bart.” 

Bart took one final sip, and began writing rapidly. 

#bartkon #konbart #bart allen #kon-el #kon el #conner kent #wally west #flashfam #fluff #vague #lightrion #yo i am always going to reference new gods if i can #at any opportunity

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

going insane and reading like 5 billion words of journalism about wrongful convictions in two weeks i think was helpful for my critical thinking skills but has probably made me very annoying for the future about anytime anyone wants to tell me that [scientific or technological tool] showed that [thing happened] because it is bananas how many things extremely commonly taken for granted as being like, meaningful investigative tools, are actually just total made-up nonsense perpetuated by people deluding themselves into thinking they have skills that don't exist. like did you know bite mark analysis is completely fake. most arson "science" that has been historically used by investigators and presented in courtrooms, totally fake. blood-spatter analysis, kernel of truth but in practice basically just lies. fake fake lies. DNA good for unconvicting people but questionable for convicting people because you shed DNA all the time and it's incredibly possible for someone to have a stranger's DNA on them for no meaningful reason. (family members often have each other's DNA on their underwear, because of, like, laundry.) so like now i just basically am walking around looking at any technology or assessment procedure that gets treated as automatic fact like, ok but is this real or is this like the arson thing again

#the big arson thing is that people thought there was a way to tell a difference after the fact between 'natural' fires #and fires set with an accelerant of some kind #but then some guys did an experiment and much to their owns surprise #no there is not

[charliefraggle]

A lot of peeps on here misread characters. I don’t mean like daydreaming about them and making them something else ( come to me union leader Adar!) I mean basically missing something about the characterisation. Or treating the character you want to think about as the character in the work.

I mean, I love What we do in the shadows- but every single person in that show is a terrible human being. They are awful to themselves, to each other, to others they meet. Hilariously so, but they aren’t a loving family. They are the alcoholics in the bar who think they are friends because they see each other every day. And if one of them is barred or stops drinking and coming in, they will go to another place not the bar twice and then go back to being at the bar every day forever. And never mention their best friend again. Because they are best friends with the alcohol not the other people there…

they are vampires who cannot change in any meaningful way and who in order to survive another day have cut away their humanity. It’s why they are fun to watch! But they aren’t positive representation of gay people or whatever! Nandor is incapable of a real relationship because he can’t see past power relations- he likes it when he is in power and he needs it. There’s a reason he loved his (mute) horse that he owned the best. And he ate him. The fact nandor suffers and is clearly shit at power in a less physical age doesn’t make that go away: the comedy comes from the difference between his self image and the reality of a not very clever man in an age he doesn’t understand. Guillermo is a horrible person who willingly kills people and has cast away his loving family for the ghost of a hope at power! He sees himself as loyal, as holding the place together, as earning a place with the sexy nighttime vampires and he is utterly deluded! That’s the comedy!

Same with Daemon, Aemond, Lestat, hell Louis. They aren’t nice people. They will not do the right thing because they are in a tragedy not a drama. Each one is brought down by hubris and that’s the point of those shows! It’s to look at hubris and power and how that strips away your humanity until you do stupid things that hurt yourself because that’s who you are now. The ache of seeing what could have been- a loving relationship, a smart beautiful girl full of potential, a hurt little boy - and seeing that slip away because of other people making decisions that make sense from their perspective and how terrible it all is - that’s the point.

#meta #tragedy and comedy #characterisation #hotd #wwdits #amc iwtv

[gothhabiba]

do you think TERFs have any valid points? I honestly am so confused by their logic, but on the other hand, aren't certain reproductive issues just for people with vaginas, just like trans people should get the center stage on their issues?

Is there any grain of truth at all in any terf arguments? I mean, yes, because terfs are interested in recruiting people and this is central to their recruitment strategy. Terfs want you to think that they are the only ones who are addressing issues that actually matter to women, that they are the only ones taking a meaningful stance contra violence against women, that they are the only alternative to useless liberal choice-based "it's empowering to purchase 1345163 skin and makeup products" feminism, and that they are the only ones who notice or are willing to talk about supposedly "obvious truths" regarding reproduction and biology, because everyone else is too cowed by "the trans cult" to do any of these things.

Terfs want to draw you in by degrees by espousing some seemingly reasonable opinions--such that you find yourself following people who just "happen" to reblog a lot of non-transmisogynistic posts from terfs because "they make some good points about non-trans issues," and then maybe following those terfs directly because you think you can sort it out and decide for yourself, and then you're exposed to more and more directly transmisogynistic and white supremacist content until you start to see these things (i.e., criticism of liberal feminism and transmisogynistic, racist sex essentialism) as logically connected. Terfs want you to believe, in fact, that transmisogynistic sex essentialism must logically follow from a critique of liberal feminism or from any actual reckoning with the material reality of women's lives, such that anyone who criticises liberal feminism without being a terf is just an incomplete terf, is "almost there" but still being held back by fear of reprisal from people who subscribe to "trans ideology," is parroting pro-trans slogans and dogma that they don't actually understand or believe because they don't want to be socially octracised and will eventually see the light. If you speak out against misogyny and liberal feminism on here a lot you can expect terfs to try hard to recruit you.

Cults, conspiracy theorists, and alt-right fascist movements like red pill / black pill work using the same "frog in a pot" technique--they play on actual concerns and real feelings of alienation and disaffection among their targets in order to gradually radicalise people by presenting disconnected arguments as logically connected, presenting themselves as the only ones with the solution to a problem, and presenting people on the outside as afraid, clueless, deluded, ignorant, and hateful towards their members and their messaging. This strategy is also why people recommend deplatforming terfs.

To answer your original question--IF there is a style of liberal trans feminism that denies that the ways in which reproductive capacity is discussed and legislated around are gendered, it is in my experience pretty niche and not primarily driven by trans women, whatever terfs claim. Of course the conception of reproductive capacity is gendered, of course lack of access to certain types of birth control, menstrual products, information about and support during pregnancy, and abortion is due to misogyny. Of course everything from medical violence against pregnant people to FGM is due to misogyny. But it doesn't follow that there are exactly two kinds of sexed body (either according to the reality of human biology or according to medical and political institutions), that you're categorically and unproblematically assigned to one or the other and always read that way, that people who are assigned "male" at birth are always unproblematically read and treated as men with all the privileges that that supposedly entails (terfs aren't good at dealing with race or class either), that trans people don't face reproductive violence, that the types of reproductive violence that concern cis women don't concern trans people--I could go on and on here, a lot of false equivalences are made around this.

For one thing, "people with vaginas" isn't really a meaningful distinction in terms of reproductive rights in the way that I think you're trying to use it in. You're trying to map "people with vaginas" (which includes... a lot of trans women?) neatly onto "people who were assigned 'female' at birth," "people who menstruate," "people who can get pregnant," "people who can carry a pregnancy to term," and probably also "people with hormonal cycles dominated by estrogen and progesterone," "people with breasts," and any number of other things--but the venn diagram of these different sets is absolutely not a circle! Any and all of these things obviously influence the trans people that they apply to just as much as the cis people they apply to? Plus the fact that women are commonly defined by their reproductive capacity obviously leads to transmisogyny & the reading of trans women as "failed" women, rather than somehow exempting trans women from misogyny (terfs SAY that they think of trans women as men, but they're very much lying). The fact that trans women need to accept sterilisation to get necessary medical care (which is what access to transition is) is a very obvious way in which the intersection of reproductive rights issues and misogyny impacts trans women. The idea that "afab people" (again, with the assumption that all of the above maps perfectly onto the same set of people) and trans women have completely discrete sets of experiences regarding the intersection of misogyny and reproductive / medical violence completely mystifies me. To the extent that those experiences are different, though, that difference does not motivate a reading of sex in humans as binary (in fact this is a colonialist, white supremacist idea), nor does it motivate a reading of trans women as sexed as "male" and therefore not subject to misogynistic control of or reading of reproductive capacity. This is all stuff that most trans feminists whom I've seen talk about this freely acknowledge.

See my /tagged/reproductive rights, /tagged/gender, and /tagged/sex binary for more.

#long post / #reproductive rights #transmisogyny #misogyny #gender #terfs

[amedetoiles]

excuse the rambling incoherency and my perhaps wildly unpopular opinions, but look, wei wuxian and jiang cheng will always forgive each other. will i continue to scream incoherently about this into the void? yes. because just - it’s inherently who they are. and this isn’t even about reconciliation! because there’s still a difference between forgiveness and opening yourself up to being vulnerable to rejection which nether of them are very good at. or the capacity to stay mad for the sake of being mad because it’s much safer and more familiar than acknowledging anything else.

this also isn’t to say that this is healthy or right, or that they shouldn’t get to be mad and hear the other apologize, and have an honest to god mature adult conversation about everything that went down between them. i’m just saying, that’s not who they are. they love each other so damn much they would sooner throw themselves needlessly in front of swords or dive head first into a crowd of murderous zombies than watch the other get hurt. they are absolutely incapable of carving each other out of their massively large hearts. forgiveness is already given. tears have been wiped. meaningful flutes have been returned. some words have been spoken behind someone’s back.

it was never really about forgiveness. for one thing, wei wuxian doesn’t think jiang cheng needs to apologize for anything, and he’s literally incapable of holding any real grudge against.. practically anyone, and more often than not shoulders all the blame himself. for another, jiang cheng hates himself way more for all the things he’s done and said than he can delude himself into hating wei wuxian. they are both fundamentally stupid about the exact same thing, and it’s that they always expect everyone to leave because they are either not important or not good enough or unlovable.

so forgiving each other for not standing with them or for inadvertently getting their favorite people killed or for lying and sacrificing their cores for each other is, dare i say it, small beans. it’s already done. i mean, they still need to hear it, because it’s nice, and good for them, and they’ll continue to presume the other hates them otherwise, but neither of them really needs the apologies. it’s not about forgiveness. it’s about trust. showing up. being there. relearning the once undeniable fact that the other would always have their back. that when they look to their side, they’re not alone. because they’re worth it enough to stay. that’s the hard part. that’s the part where they’re stuck. because neither one of them think they actually deserve it.

#陈情令 #the untamed #mdzs #mdzs meta #jiang cheng #wei wuxian #yunmeng shuangjie #!mine #!meta #as always rambling for no other reason other than needing to get loud unnecessary feelings off my chest #also sometimes i see and read things and have to go scream #but just #they have plenty of issues they need to work through but forgiveness isn’t one of them #it’s just there #they love each other that much #now to believe that the other loves them back #you can do it babies! #also i really do like the idea of wwx being mad about everything that’s happened to him #but it’s just not who he is

[ocean-stuck]

what pisses me off is that all the pieces for an actually good show were there, and instead sotsu wasted its runtime on redundant scenes and dumb arguments about studying

the rest of the club basically only existed to be victims of torture porn. it's a shame; given that by the start of sotsugyou satoko has apparently looped so many times that the original villains consistently have changes of heart, you'd think it'd only be a matter of time before they'd start remembering the new loops with enough clarity to do something meaningful. it stuck out to me that the new loops were punishing them for things that would've been the right decision in the original ones, so i was sure that even if they didn't recall enough to piece together what was going on, this might bite satoko in the ass by making future loops devolve in a way she couldn't control. that would've given those arcs some point beyond pointlessly baiting newcomers, but no

it makes hanyuu's assertions about creating miracles nonsensical, that miracles aren't spontaneously conjured by deus ex machina but born from the concentrated efforts of people. this is obviously taken from the vn where it's true and the entire thrust of kai, but here it's laughable because...the exact opposite happens. no one's actions lead rika to the truth, instead she just spontaneously remembers a thing that happened without even actively looking for whatever dragged her back into this nightmare

and oh satoko. i sincerely wish the people still insisting it was deeper than what we got would stop deluding themselves already, but on the other hand i feel bad for their wasted effort and wish they'd been right because that'd be a way better story than this joke. just...i liked the spectacle of the fight in sotsu ep 14 and i wish it existed in a better show, but immediately i noticed the actual substance was literally just a retread of their fight in satokowashi, only worse because at this point you'd think they'd be different people. and they still won't shut the fuck up about "but muh studying!!!" like, the first time i was willing to believe satoko was just putting her foot in her mouth, but in the climactic fight where emotions are at their highest and the girls are ostensibly finally seeing eye to eye and learning to resolve their differences? i half-expected satoko to turn to the camera and go "you still think this is about my stupid grades???" but no, she and the framing have decided that that is what it is, actually

(and rika isn't even like "bitch you've been murdering me and our friends!!" like i know witches have a fucked up view on non-looping people, where they're like pets in the best of circumstances and the versions that aren't what the witch wants are seen as less "real", but you'd think it'd still suck enough for rika to be salty about it)

and there was so much else they could make it about. even just focusing on st. lucia, since whoever was at the wheel mysteriously forgot all of satoko's other trauma that might give her abandonment issues serious enough for this to be thinkable, they could've focused on the culture and the faculty being so cold and punishing that even if satoko were good at studying, or just timeloop-cheated her way through class, there was no guarantee she wouldn't be miserable anyway. (to say nothing of the oft-observed fact that shion, satoko's nee-nee, would know all this but didn't say anything when there was no sign of something stopping her. even if she couldn't come to town for some reason, did eua make landlines not exist??)

and we're supposed to see her as troubled and conflicted, but instead of ever showing us this they just give us endless shots of ooo spoopy eyes and padding that answers questions that didn't need answering. earthenterran basically summed up how this could be better, but if they wanted this "satoko is at such war with herself that her internal conflict externalizes itself and creates lambda" angle, they needed to actually show her at war with herself beyond a couple sad faces that can be counted on one hand. have her hesitate repeatedly, throughout both satokowashi and sotsu. hell, they could even have an internal monologue scene with a second satoko whispering rationalizations, giving people a holy shit moment when this second satoko physically manifests in the sea of fragments while also priming the curious on the mechanics of umineko, the way witches work and the nature of its fantasy as something that can be either literal or metaphorical

instead, the only way they could've blundered this further is if they gave satoko a moustache to twirl

i can't imagine this was the story sotsugyou was intended to be, and one wonders if jun is different specifically to avoid repeating it. if i created something this atrocious, it'd take a legally binding contract to stop me from disowning it at this point

#higurashi #higurashi sotsu #sotsu critical #rika furude #satoko houjou #don't give me any ''but but umineko!!'' crap #i'm reading it already and i know all the relevant bits #doesn't make sotsugyou suck less #i don't have issues with the integration since it's still coherent even if you're out of the loop #it's just done badly in that it isn't well established and is dragged down by an underwhelming story

[sd1d-enthusiast]

Mr Queen Ending: A Queer Baiting Disaster

Have not felt so utterly devastated about a show since Game of Thrones Season 8 

I loved this show, okay? I waited eagerly for every episode, I laughed, I cried, I put it down into my "all time favorites." I was so ready to give it a 10 rating. And now I don't think I can ever re-watch it after how the ending completely ERASED and NEGATED the journey of the first 19 episodes. Much like how Game of Thrones Season 8 managed to destroy the previous masterpiece seasons, the ending of this show—literally the last thirty minutes—managed to completely unravel and make the previous 19 episodes utterly meaningless. Utterly pointless. Spoilers ahead:

This ending is garbage. Pure fucking garbage. I don't understand how ANYONE can like an ending like this without completely deluding themselves. I'm mindblown at the amount of ppl going "it was a great ending, it tied everything up!" HOW? The person who the king fell in love with and the person who ends up with the king are TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PEOPLE. The king will live the rest of his life as a lie, with a person he never spared a second glance to before in his life. Bong Hwan will live the rest of his life knowing that history could be changed and yet someone ELSE got to live and love the man he fell in love with.

This whole drama, we followed BONG HWAN'S story, his growth, his fears, the way he progressed as a character, the way he fell in love with the king. Yet in the end, Bong Hwan was nothing but a stepping stone for So Yong to take his place. His journey and character growth became nothing but a means to someone else's happiness.

I don't think people understand. This isn't a happy ending. The one who the king fell in love with (bong hwan) is NO LONGER THERE. He's left with nothing. So yong, a complete stranger to us, is the one who gets the happy ending. Bong Hwan, who actually experienced everything with the king....becomes a side character to his own story.

This was one of my favorite dramas of all time, but this ending managed to erase every bit of rewatch quality for me. It erased every meaningful interaction between our leads bc at the end one of the leads is ERASED and replaced by someone who experienced NONE of what made those two people fall in love with each other. It feels like a slap on the face for everyone who rooted for the actual relationship between the Mr Queen who we came to love and know and the King.

If they wanted to have the ending be with the real So Yong and the King, then they should have had So Yong as the main character. Not Bong Hwan in her body. They could have played with the "they are each other's reincarnation" theory or the "the two people fused into one mind" theory. Anything would have been better than this farce. The king fell in love with the Mr Queen who was strange, wacky, a modern thinker, a feminist, liberal, a little bit crazy. The Mr Queen who walked like a man and who taught him strange words, the one who told him that he was a good man and a good king, the person who helped the king find faith and hope in the nightmare he was living. That was all Bong Hwan. Not So Yong.

And everyone seems to be ignoring that So Yong is now literally doing what Hwa Jin did to Choel Jong lying about who she really is and pretending to be someone else. We all hated Hwa Jin for lying and trying to replace the Queen, but now what? She knows she's not the person who the king fell in love with. The king still thinks that the woman he's speaking to is someone else. They're both living a lie. The same thing is happening, but because it's the original woman we're supposed to applaud for it? Think it makes everything fine? Insanity.

I can't help but think that some of the people celebrating this ending and saying that it's better that So-yong, the woman who the king did not fall in love with, got to be with the King over the man who he did fall in love with are closet homophobes who would rather have a completely different female character end up with the king rather than the man who was at the heart of this show. At the very least, the show producers probably thought that. This whole show feels like one massive queer bait and the ending hurts more than I can say.

The first 19 episodes would have been a clear 10/10. If only the last episode hadn't completely negated those 19 episodes. If only.

I haven't felt so devastated since Game of Thrones Season 8. It feels like a slap on the face after all the feelings I and other viewers invested in this story, in BONG HWAN's story, only to be paid dust. The person the King fell in love with, the one who understood him and the one who he tried so hard to understand, know, and love....is gone. The Bong Hwan who was at the heart of this story is GONE. Erased and replaced in his OWN STORY. 

This isn't a happy ending; it's a tragedy.

My original review can be found here on mydramalist. 

#mr queen #queen cheorin #kdrama #mr. queen #shin hye sun #kim jung hyun #go princess go #kdrama review #I am furious and devastated at this ending #day totally ruined #sigh #got s8

[lilyhoshikawa]

🎥💕💎

Nyanko didn’t specify so I’m gonna do this abt WKTD and u can’t stop me!!

🎥: Do you have any favorite scenes from your hyperfixation?

I’m a basic Jupiter kinnie sadly so as expected. My favorite scene has gotta be the Red Ending 3am scene. There’s such a beautiful, horrible tension in the early moments- the anxiety and uncertainty over knowing that the least obvious among the trio is going to become the devil, the sad bargaining in lines like

“We don’t need to know who the devil is. It’s just a phase. …right?”

Which transitions into this pleading, and then

Venus: “I can feel fingers on my face and arm and everywhere.”

Jupiter: “Ahaha. Gross. I’m gross.”

And then the most iconic scene in this entire game, the most powerful and tiny act of the hair tie breaking, a piece of symbolism so small yet so monumentally significant. And then everything that follows, the entire speech.

“Don’t touch me. You shouldn’t touch me. I wasn’t born good.”

Talk abt lines that live in my mind rent free dhdjbdjd. Everyone talks about “I wasn’t born good” bc it’s a killer line and very relatable, but shoutout to some other stars:

“I can try hard, but I think… God knows my heart isn’t really in it.”

“Y’all are sweet. But don’t do that. I won’t be happy if you do.”

“I want to touch. I want to be touched. I want to hurt. I want to be hurt. And if you feel the same way, you’re as bad as me.”

“Won’t you let me feel like a real devil for a moment?”

And that’s all just. Amazing. There’s so much to say abt that from the perspective of religious guilt alone, of ppl who have experienced that unique kind of internal struggle with Christianity, let alone the compounded complications of being gay, trans, neurodivergent. It’s a really impactful scene especially for the game’s themes, bringing them all together in the perspective of your typical idealistic leader character, of the one who wants to be good the most (that’s also why it’s imperative you play this ending last).

💕: Tell us about one of your favorite characters and why you like them!

I have committed the grave act of hubris in answering that first category in-depth before realizing I already elaborated on my answer for this one. Oops! Oh well.

Obviously it doesn’t take much to figure out my fave of the trio but every character is really important and I don’t wanna get caught up in rambling about Jupiter knowing she seems to be most ppl’s favorite.

All of the trio have different reactions to trauma, in particular the trauma of their world in which Christian morality is the actual law of the land. Many ppl can relate to Jupiter’s need to go along with it and to “fix herself” but I find the other two equally compelling.

Neptune isn’t happy with the way things are, she’s furious, bitter and burned. It’s criminal that the writers don’t elaborate on it more, but she’s existed for this long in a system that has already judged her bad, has already decided her very existence is wrong, and to her, it’s horrific and baffling how many people are okay to sit back and accept the same. The pain she feels watching the other members of her group suffer, trying so hard to appease a system that has already discarded them. Neptune isn’t interested in offering platitudes to a system that has already tossed her to the side, deemed her bad and irredeemable. Frankly, she doesn’t even care. What hurts her, what bothers her, is seeing other people grapple with the guilt that isn’t theirs to own, to try and fix in themselves what was never a problem to begin with. It’s like seeing a friend suffer a tragedy and blame themselves every time.

And Venus, perhaps most interesting of all, also knows that. She’s aware that the system is stacked against her and everyone else, and she’s bitter about it, but she knows nothing else. She goes along with it, and all the bullying and pain and hardship that comes with it. She isn’t deluded into trying to overturn her odds and prove herself to be good like Jupiter is, she’s apathetic, she’s accepted the hand she’s been dealt. She doesn’t fight back against her bullies because she has simply accepted their abuse as a natural part of her existence. She wants more, wants better, and has glimpses of hope that it’s obtainable- perhaps if she does what she’s told, if she doesn’t complain, if she puts up with it, one day she’ll get what she wants, what she needs to survive. But she won’t, she never will. She accepts all the hardship, all the abuse, all the confusion or a world built for and around people who aren’t like her, who can’t understand her- and she does it silently hoping things may get better on their own.

All three worst girls mean so much, have such meaningful and interesting perspectives and tell such compelling stories on personal levels which are only made more powerful by their union, by their coexistence and the vague, awkward but hopeful clashing of their disparate realities, coping mechanisms and outlooks. It’s shaky, it’s difficult, but they provide for each other what they each lack- Jupiter receive permission to be enough as she is, Neptune receives validation and companionship, and Venus receives the accommodations she needs to be her authentic self, no longer hidden. It’s really powerful, for trauma survivors and the mentally ill and for LGBT+ ppl.

💎 Are there any fun facts or trivia you would like to share?

Something most ppl may know but that I almost missed is that the original demo for the game- titled “We Know the Demo”- is actually not just a shortened version of the game or anything, but a unique prequel story that fills in some more gaps in characterization and worldbuilding, which I found very valuable for my fic “The Light God Didn’t Make.”

It includes such scenes as Neptune being secretly unstoppable at dodgeball, Venus infodumping, Neptune pointing out the fact we all know that Jupiter would look cool holding a guitar, and also Venus singing. All of them iconic bits.

The demo is free off the developers’ website and functions basically the same as the game, with picking a duo of characters to interact in each scene, so it’s a great complimentary piece to play before or after, and it’s really helpful in developing a better characterization of the trio if ur looking for that.

#oops I talked for 40 minutes oh no #meme response #thesunsetbox #rambles #wktd

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Why do we feel such strong emotions to not existent people? How do people have crush and /or other deep feelings for... for example, Lotor?

Hi, anon! Wow, great question! A lot of researchers and psychologists have asked similar questions. The term “parasocial relationship” was coined by Horton and Wohl in 1956 to describe the deep relational emotions that fans were attributing to celebrities who had never actually met them before. Over time, the phrase “parasocial relationship” has moved to also mean the one-sided relationships that viewers can make with fictional characters as well, whether those bonds are based in friendship, romance, or even vicariously living through that character (kinning).

So when you talk about a fan connecting deeply with Lotor, then we’re talking about that fan’s parasocial relationship. And that phrase might help you find more psychology research about this if you’re interested!

To answer your question about “why” people make these kinds of bonds:

A 2018 academic article (Parasocial Relationships with Fictional Characters in Therapy) by Kathleen Gannon states, “Parasocial relationships can build overtime, and the more that someone is viewing, playing or reading about a character’s story the more likely that this connection to them will become more intense (Hall, 2017).” In other words, the more you’re exposed to the story of a character, the more likely you are to develop emotions for that character, and for those emotions to grow.

The types of emotions you might have for a character can depend on many factors, of course. But Gannon’s article and various others go on talk about how you might see yourself in a character, or see them experiencing a struggle you’re facing in real life, and those details inspire you to create empathy bonds. Some people admire the looks or traits of a character and want to be them, etc.

So that emotion you have for a character, whatever the emotion, is real, even if the fiction inspiring that emotion isn’t. And those emotions then help to dictate the type of bond you might have toward that character.

This article by Catherine Anillo (”Why we mourn fictional characters: The very real emotion behind fake death”) adds that the social phenomenon of several people coming together over a character further heightens that parasocial relationship. Because now, even if that character is fictional, the community based around them is in fact real, and your conversations about them are real, etc. That character becomes part of an actual, real-life culture and can even inform the real-life friendships and relationships you build, as well as your own personality or identity. 

But is “level of exposure” the only factor for why someone might build a parasocial relationship? 

Tilo Hartmann in his 2016 paper, Parasocial Interaction, Parasocial Relationships, and Well-Being, explores this:

There’s some research about how parasocial relationships may be a stand-in for lonely people who don’t have such relationships in real life, have been rejected in real life, or don’t have the social skills to have real relationships. This is called the Compensation Hypothesis, and it’s a little controversial. While there are some studies supporting this, there’s also several other studies showing that the Compensation Hypothesis can’t explain why so many well-adjusted people engage in parasocial relationships. In fact, Hartmann reveals that a lot of people who engage in parasocial relationshps aren’t lonely in real life and showed strong interpersonal skills during the study:

“Contrary to the skill-deficit compensation idea, research has found that people who are both motivated and able to develop social relationships, e.g., extro-verted individuals, may develop both more intense real and parasocial relationships. For example, in a study by Vorderer and Knobloch (1996), individuals who were not very motivated to mix with other people, but also were not shy, maintained the strongest parasocial relationships. Likewise, Tsao (1996) found that socially skilled people, i.e., individuals with higher cognitive and affective trait empathy, maintained the strongest parasocial relationships. In addition, in his study, trait extraversion was positively related to parasocial relationship intensity, whereas trait introversion was unrelated. Taken together these findings suggest that, contrary to the skill-deficit compensation hypothesis, people with greater – not weaker – interpersonal skills develop more intense parasocial relationships.” - page 135

Hartmann’s collected research overview goes on to suggest that there are levels of parasocial relationships and different kinds of attachments—in that some people have very, very intense attachments while others have a milder form of attachment. The research does seem to indicate that people with social anxieties might experience a more intense parasocial relationship with a fictional character or celebrity, compared to a person who is not as afraid of social rejection. And that explanation makes sense because…in a parasocial relationship, you’re the one in control of the relationship. The fictional character can’t actually say “no” to you or disagree/be cruel unless you envision them doing this. The fictional character satisfies the need to belong.

But according to collected research in Hartmann’s paper, it seems a willingness to engage in a parasocial relationship at all is part of what drives the entire entertainment industry and makes fiction a fun pastime for everyone (mentioned on page 137). If people can’t build a parasocial relationship with a show’s characters, then that show isn’t going to be seen as particularly likeable either. And even having relational emotions about social network blogs or twitters, etc. is a form of a parasocial relationship.

But is all of this bad?

That first article I tossed out, by Kathleen Gannon, talks about the use of parasocial relationships in therapy environments. So it seems that psychologists have become increasingly interested in plugging into this social phenomenon to help patients overcome things like trauma and anxieties, etc. And even Gannon herself acknowledges the type of fun and enjoyable communities that people build within cosplay circles, conventions, which also can feed into one’s own career.

So it seems like the answer to “why do we do this” involves a combination of these things:

Humans can make pack bonds with literally anything because we are emotional jelly bags, and very few people are immune to creating empathy bonds. The whole entertainment industry feeds off this very basic phenomenon and actually tries to hook you so that you’ll support a show or celebrity.

Parasocial relationships can help people overcome or face real-life issues or have an escape from real-life pressures.

Parasocial relationships are a known means of accessing fun communities and friendships with other like-minded people and can healthily add to a sense of well-being, social community, and identity.

(Note, the research from Hartmann does caution that a parasosocial relationship can become unhealthy/pathological, such as in the case of people who fully substitute real-life relationships for parasocial ones and isolate themselves from real people, or delude themselves into expecting that the character/celebrity can and should reciprocate the relationship. - page 138. So just like any relationship or social bond, a parasocial relationship has to exist within certain parameters for it to be a healthy and fun/meaningful addition to your life.)

But “why do people make a parasocial relationship with Lotor” specifically?

It seems the Lotor fandom is composed of many people with many different reasons for why they like this character:

The Lotor character is dynamic with several talents and flaws, so that makes him feel more real to begin with, as opposed to some wooden/static heroes or comic book villains. He’s very complex with a wide range of emotion and thought processes and motivations. He’s relatable because he’s imperfect, more fleshed out. More capable of being unpredictable, like real people are.

People seem to identify with his struggles as a person of mixed heritage and as a person who has suffered abuse and psychological trauma from his parents.

A lot of people admire that this character also doesn’t allow himself to be defined by a victim card. So for many, he takes on even a “role model” vibe in relation to overcoming abuse or prejudice.

A lot of people like that he has nerd vibes while also being physically powerful and commanding with weapons. So he’s both mentally and physically capable as a character. They might either want that for themselves or else are attracted to those traits existing in the same character.  

He’s a very aesthetically pleasing character to many, with a complex visual design, so I do think people admire that about him, and that inspires other types of emotional bonds as well.

His darker, more dangerous side makes him an interesting springboard for typical power fantasies, potential Jungian “Shadow Confrontation,” or some kind of wish fulfillment.

The VLD show itself really played on viewer emotional bonds with this character by consistently showing his backstory in a sympathetic light, down to even flashbacks of him as an innocent child being brainwashed by toxic culture and growing up in an environment without Voltron to save him. So the way the show presented Lotor really heightened people’s already established connections with Lotor.

There’s probably other reasons that I’m just not thinking about why people connect with Lotor, lol. But either way, I hope at least some of this info helps answer your question or gives you resources or ideas to research further! 

#Lotor #Voltron #Parasocial Relationships #Mental Health #Social community #Lightning doing some research

[hypnoticwinter]

Down the Rabbit Hole part 21

The Sergeant sprays me down next and I keep my mouth shut and breathe shallowly through my nose, but the same raw chemical odor still forces its fingers down my throat and makes my guts churn. I cough and the Sergeant gives me a rough smile that says something like ‘grin and bear it, soldier,’ and then he’s done and moving on to Klaus.

Ahead of us is the gate to the copepod barrows, a vast wall of metal set directly into the flesh of the Pit, with one of the ubiquitous submarine-style doors and a host of warnings slathered over the it in bright, eye-catching shades. One warns of hostile arthropods ahead and states that the buddy system is mandatory; another warns that the barrows are not area mapped and to exercise caution; another says that free fire is authorized and encourages rangers within to double-check their ID tags and to make sure they check their targets; a third states in bold letters that it is a felony for both civilians and non-combat-trained park personnel to enter, punishable by a fine of up to $1000, imprisonment, and administrative penalty, if applicable. A fourth states that there is nothing beyond this point worth dying for and practically begs the reader not to enter. The paint on this last example is peeling and the latter half of it looks stained by some kind of ichor.

My heart, which has been residing comfortably in my throat this past hour or so, does an ugly little squeeze and for a moment I feel somewhat faint, but I close my eyes and focus on the pounding in my ears and the feeling passes after a moment. I still have the tingles of anticipation racing up and down my arms, and my hands are quivering, though I can’t tell whether it’s out of fear or out of adrenaline overload.

Elena sneezes again next to me and I look over at her, then lean in. I know I shouldn’t ask, I know it’s practically pointless because the answer is obligatory, but I ask her anyway: “Are – are we going to be okay in there?”

Elena shrugs and looks at me with bleary eyes. “We’ll be fine,” she assures me, but there is an edge of tension in her voice that tells me the real answer isn’t nearly so cut and dried. “We have an…understanding with the copepods. We don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with us. Plus the pheromone spray will make us smell really unappetizing.”

“Even when we march right in and bother them?”

“When there’s this many of us they’ll think twice about starting anything.”

I neglect to mention that that cuts both ways. Or any of the other dozen holes in that logic that I can see. What if a copepod isn’t as smart as we are and thinks it can just scuttle up and grab one of us? Then one of us shoots it and they all take that as the signal to go ham on us? How smart are copepods anyway?

I swallow hard and push it out of my mind. Between the pheromone spray that the Sergeant is treating all of us with, including Joker, and Elena’s assurance that they do this all the time and it’s only somewhat dangerous, I am almost able to delude myself into thinking that we’ll be okay.

No, stop that. No negative thinking. These men and women (okay, well, woman) do this for a living and they’re paid very highly for what they do. If they say it’s safe, it’s surely safe.

Alright, says the little voice, whispering from its burrow at the back of my skull, let’s just ignore the fact that everyone has gotten very tight-lipped and anxious the closer we got to this place, let’s just ignore that everyone has triple-checked their rifles while we’ve been standing here, let’s just ignore –

Yes, I think savagely to myself, let’s just ignore all that. This is what you wanted, Roan, isn’t it, exhilaration and dangerous circumstances, right? This is the logical extension of chain-smoking, just more immediate. What would be worse, a death in twenty years of lung cancer or a death right now by disembowelment and then getting eaten alive by an arthropod? If you weren’t stupid enough to believe Thor when he told you that –

Elena squeezes my hand, interrupting my internal monologue, and then the foot-thick reinforced door to the barrows is swinging open at the Sergeant’s hand, and I have no more time for thoughts.

“Stick very close to me,” Elena reminds me, and I nod, not trusting myself to speak. There is a cold sweat along the back of my neck and I ball up the loose rubberized fabric at my thighs to keep my hands from shuddering.

One by one we file into the barrows, and then the Sergeant seals the door behind us, trapping us inside. All around me I hear sounds of slug rifle actions being racked and shells being chambered. I see Euler, just a few feet away, swallowing hard, pressing rarely used buttons on the controller, and see Joker, correspondingly, flash on a pair of headlights and unsling its rifle from around its shoulders, tossing the meter-long gunmetal rod around like it were a toy.

I look around at the barrows and to my immense surprise my initial reaction is disappointment. I guess I had anticipated surroundings even stranger than the rest of the Pit, something really weird to mark that we’re in the part of the map where the optimistic medieval cartographer would draw sea serpents rather than blank space, but the flesh on the inside of the vast stainless surgical-steel retaining wall is just as rugose and squamous and eldritch as the flesh on the outside. If the wall and all of the warning signs plastered rather tackily all over it weren’t in the way you practically wouldn’t be able to tell that you’d crossed over the boundary into The Forbidden Zone.

Here be monsters and so on. None are immediately forthcoming, however, and the Sergeant resumes his spot at the head of the column and takes out the slim palm-pilot-like locator device keyed to the tracker on the crystal and points towards one of the dripping orifices leading deeper within, and where he points we follow.

There’s something meaningful there, I think to myself, as my boots squelch against the vast living floor and my eyes scrape along the edges of the vast living walls and my nose inhales the reek of the vast living space I’m crawling through like a parasite. Because truly there likely is no real meaningful boundary between the barrows and the rest of the Pit, it’s just a place the copepods like to nest. Perhaps it’s got the perfect temperature for them or it has an abundance of food or it has – some other quality that they desire more than other parts. But, I think as I crane my neck back and glare at the wall receding into the darkness behind us, that boundary there certainly wouldn’t have been one they would have picked.

Or perhaps I’m anthropomorphizing too much. Perhaps the copepods wouldn’t have picked anything, perhaps their range is the same as the range of their tinier oceangoing fellows, spreading wherever they might and if the surroundings aren’t suitable to support their life, they die.

I remember Peter’s tale of the copepod that wanted to see the sunlight and wonder, and then fifteen minutes later I see my first copepod and the sight of the massive crustacean shatters whatever pondering introspectiveness that I had summoned to, I realize now, shield me from the brutality I had been anticipating.

The copepod, at any rate, was small, at least according to Elena. I had underestimated their bulk, just based off of Peter’s story. This one was the size, perhaps, of a smallish boat, and streamlined roughly the same, a bulbous cigar-like body tapering at both ends to a tail and to a head, with a pair of reticulated arms terminating in creepy little hands with long grasping fingers. Something about their five-fingered familiarity filled me with dread, and watching the way the copepod cocked its head at us from the warty, encrusted protuberance it had partially emerged from, I thought I could have detected a canniness to it that shattered my half-conceived notion of the copepods as being simply overgrown louses or similar. It was, I realized, sizing us up.

Evidently we were present in numbers large enough to prove unpalatable, for it retreated back into its hole with a squelching noise like a fart and let us be. I breathed out a sigh of relief when it went and Elena squeezed my hand.

My initial impressions were wrong, anyway, because the deeper we go the more the flesh around us seems to crinkle and whorl and shrink down, without really losing any volume or pressing down further against us, without restricting our movement overly compared to the flesh outside. It’s as though this portion of the Pit were, for whatever reason, much older than the rest, although that doesn’t really make any sense, and what I’m seeing are all the assorted wrinkles and liver spots and jaundices that would come from that age. It sags in here, the ceiling bulges downwards and blisters occasionally, wet and fragile-looking and dripping in places. I think I can smell ballast and I discover that that night only – Christ, only a day ago, had imprinted something indelible and Pavlovian into me, for with the smell of the ballast I only felt my knees weaken slightly and my pulse quicken whenever I glanced at Elena, which was frequently.

Encounters with copepods become gradually more common the deeper we press. We see them all over the place, great overgrown louses burrowing amid the flesh, peeking out at us blearily or waving their rotund abdomens as they struggle, pale and phallic, to force themselves into reluctantly elastic orifices. Many times they look at us, eyes like faceted obsidian paperweights sunk in their broad, plated skulls, and I feel the same eerie sense of sizing up that I had noticed before, the same sense of analysis, but not a single one of them even makes a move in our direction.

Two hours in I incline my head closer to Elena and ask her how smart these things are, really, and she shrugs, her shoulder nudging at my chin. “I don’t think anyone really knows,” she says, “but the conventional wisdom is that they’re about as smart as five-year-olds.”

I think about that, really think about it, about what that implies. I remember being five; I was conscious and functional, if a little stupid and naïve. I couldn’t have fended for myself but I was also a soft, coddled human child, not an arthropod the size of a truck. I know cockatoos and dolphins are about as smart as three-year-olds, I know that some cephalopods like cuttlefish are supposed to be rather intelligent as well.

Maybe it’s too much of an abstraction. Saying something is as smart as a five-year-old implies a number of things and invites the listener to imagine various things that are true about five-year-olds that might not necessarily be true about the animal in question. Perhaps a copepod is only as smart as a five-year-old in certain areas, like in recognizing itself in a mirror or foraging for food or in performing certain types of logic puzzles. Perhaps –

“You okay?” Elena asks me, and I realize I’m doing it again, I’m retreating into myself as a sort of anticipatory cringe. The air is electric in here and though nothing has happened so far some deep-seated monkey part of my brain knows that we are in a capital-letter Bad Place with Bad Things in it that want to do Bad Acts to my poor little monkey body, and if I go analytical, if I shove all of my thought into the high-level abstract end of the spectrum maybe it won’t hurt so bad when I’m being eaten alive.

Stop. Here and now, Roan, I tell myself. Psychoanalyze yourself later.

Elena nudges me and repeats herself and I realize with a kind of aching clarity that I am very, perhaps mortally frightened, and when I look at her all that I want, all that I need, on some kind of overpowering molecular level, is for her to hold me very tightly until this is all over. I think my lip even trembles a little, and I can tell from the tiny judder in her eye when it does that she notices. I don’t even have the presence of mind to curl my lip at myself at this effervescent and overly enthusiastic gesture of weakness. I must be losing my touch.

Elena takes a hand off her rifle and knits her gloved fingers awkwardly with mine, and then she does something with her radio and then I can hear her, as close and as clear as if she were inside my helmet with me.

“Roan,” she says, adding quickly that this is one-way only, some sort of ranger trick with the equipment that would take me too long or be too technical to replicate on my end, “I know you’re scared but you’ve been so strong so far and I’m so proud of you. I – “ she says, and then she breaks off for a moment, and I recognize in the silence a kind of precipice that she is dangling off of and she doesn’t know for a moment whether or not to let go or to pull herself back up. I’m smiling, I’m staring at her and I’m smiling and willing her to just tell me, to open up and say whatever it is she wanted to say, to not think for just a moment, but when she speaks again I can see that she brought herself back from it and is taking a more measured approach, she is looking before she leaps, which although reasonable leaves me aching with the desire to hold her, to put my hand to her cheek and tell her that no matter what she wanted to say to me I would have wanted to hear it.

“I am so glad,” she says finally, “that I kissed you, I’m so glad that all of this happened between us, and I’m not going to let anything happen to you down here. I promise.”

And then I reach over and slip my arm around her hip and tug her into me and although I cannot really tell her how I feel without clunking my helmet against hers and yelling I think she gets the idea that I do feel better.

We spend the next half hour or so with her radio still linked up to mine and with her low voice like cool water whispering comforting, sensual things directly into my ears, and though more copepods – or perhaps just a rotating menagerie of the same five or so, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference – come and inspect us warily from a safe distance, clinging to the walls and prodding their heads out of vents as we pass, I manage not to feel too frightened of them.

Elena tells me about herself, about the year she spent in France after she graduated high school and her parents still thought she was going to go to college, about the time she cracked a rib from laughing too hard, about the time that she got into a car accident and it turned out to be an ex-boyfriend that she had rear-ended and they ended up getting back together and he rear-ended her, and she says this last with a lascivious little grin I can hear very clearly and it both makes me picture it and bite my lip a little and makes me snicker because it is the dumbest way to refer to sex that I’ve ever heard, and I realize that it has been far, far too long since I’ve had a friend like this, someone who’s been willing to expose at least a little of their life to me without heavy editing getting in the way. I learn that she drinks but not heavily, that she likes the taste of whiskey but doesn’t like how drunk it gets her, that she tried to smoke a cigarette once and vomited all over her shoes and has never been able to smell cigarette smoke without feeling vaguely nauseous afterwards.

I feel a little jolt of serendipity blossoming in my heart, and I think of the crumpled pack of cigarettes, still half-full, laying in the muck at the bottom of the vent to the ballast bulb.

I learn that she likes jazz music and blues music and that one of her favorite musicians is Dave van Ronk but that she also (she admits with a wry little shake of her head) likes pop music and that she also feels vaguely ashamed of it whenever she looks at the small stack of CDs she keeps with her things back in the barracks. I learn that Fall Out Boy and Green Day have made the list, along with some Coltrane and Louis Armstrong, but also Five Iron Frenzy and Cold War Kids and Florence and the Machine and Queens of the Stone Age and Pearl Jam.

She tells me about how when she was a kid she wanted to be a figure skater and trained for so long and so hard but she didn’t have enough talent to really do it at a meaningful level, and her dream was always to go to the Olympics for it but it was something that she had leave behind, and she had ended up channeling that competitiveness and drive and motivation into diving instead and found that she was good at it, that she was beyond good at it, that she found a freedom there underwater that she hadn’t expected, and she had grabbed it like a quarterback and ran with it until she had ended up here.

She tells me about high school, how she was one of the lacrosse girls, and instantly I ache for her in a way that’s almost palpable, because one of my first real crushes on a girl had been in the senior year of high school, and every day I would walk across the bridge to the cafeteria at the same time that she was coming back with a group of her friends, wearing that blazing maroon and white oversized polo shirts that I found so indelibly attractive, and it had awoke something in me that had apparently decided afterwards to fall back asleep afterwards, with mild snoring in college, until it finally burst out of bed roughly four days ago at 2 PM in the metaphorical afternoon with a panicked look at the alarm clock.

There is a lull in the one-sided conversation for a moment and I look over at her wondering if something is wrong but I catch her staring at me with an abundantly warm look of open fondness on her face that immediately pushes a rising heat into my cheeks and makes me look away quickly.

She tells me that she likes my body, that she knows I think I’m too skinny and frail and what the hell ever else I think is wrong with me but she thinks my face and my big wonky Roman nose is terrifically aesthetic. She loves the little dimples I have just above my ass, and she loves my ass and the way I make a little animal grunting noise in my throat whenever she squeezes or spanks it. She loves the way that I’m so thin that she can wrap both her arms around me and hold me very tight and feel me wriggle against her. She loves the way that I nuzzle against her in my sleep and the way that, occasionally, she’s noticed, I mumble things and give her affectionate, uncoordinated kisses without ever waking up, and then press myself back into her bosom and settle down again.

She loves the way I cry out softly when I cum and dig my nails into her without meaning to, and she loves the way that my tongue knows exactly what to do when I lap at her. She loves how I taste and how I smell and even though it’s been a couple days of hard work and neither of us are particularly fresh as daisies at the present moment she’s loved giving me impromptu baths with wet-wipes so she has another excuse to cup my small breasts and watch my cheeks color when her thumb and forefinger come together on my small, sensitive nipples. She likes the way that I’m more passive than she is, that she gets to take charge, she likes the trust I show her when I do that and she promises to never, ever abuse it. She likes the way that I look at her when her hand is squeezing gently around my throat, the way my mouth drops halfway open and I practically start to pant I want it so bad.

Halfway through this list I had begun to feel embarrassed, but I’ve wrapped all the way around and ended up feeling fuzzy and clear and incredibly, incredibly warm.

She has a whole litany of these things that she loves about me and I end up grinning so widely as she recites them to me, her tone growing slowly more and more pleased as she does so, that I flash a copepod a dazzling smile from about thirty feet away and I amuse myself by imagining that it looks confused as it turns and thrusts itself back into the flesh of the wall.

I wish I had some adequate way to tell her that nobody, not even Thor, has ever done anything like this for me. Nobody’s ever recognized that I was frightened and out of my element and distracted me so organically and effortlessly and unselfconsciously that I didn’t even realize at first, and by the time I did I was too flattered to care. I settle for just holding here there to me and listening to her voice as we pry deeper into the Pit, into the barrows.

With my hand there on the gentle swell of Elena’s hip and the crook of her elbow nestled tight against my side, the rifle clanking lightly in a rhythmic pattern as we walk, it is easy enough to forget that we are all presently in mortal danger.

 * * *

 We’ve stopped now, in the middle of a broad flat chamber that throbs like a drum to a sickly organic beat coming from somewhere below. It feels like walking on a waterbed. The Sergeant is stopped there ahead of us, staring at the locator PDA clutched in his gloved palm with a curious expression that on any lesser man I would categorize as either chagrin or hesitance, but either of those would be frightfully out of place on the Sergeant so I simply assume that it’s some trick of the light bouncing off the glass of the faceplate masking his characteristically immobile face.

I watch as he reaches down to the radio at his waist. “Veret,” he says, his voice faint and crackly in my helmet, “the Big Guy has it.”

He says this improbable phrase with such complete nonchalance that I think initially that I must have misheard him. Then the radio sparks and Makado’s voice, equally grainy, blooms in my ears. “Shit,” she says, dead serious. “Are you sure?”

“Locator’s pointing right to it.”

“I wish we had fucking known –“

“No time,” the Sergeant growls curtly. “Can we go in?”

Dead silence for a moment. It stretches like taffy. I glance over at Elena; she looks concerned, but whatever line Makado is speaking on has overridden the link that Elena had rigged between us. Her lips move softly and then she shakes her head.

“Alright,” Makado says, “go in.”

The Sergeant waits a full fifteen seconds before he acknowledges the order and then gestures to the rest of us and we trundle ahead towards the puckered vent ahead of us. It’s narrow, so narrow that we have to get out the jack again, the lower-powered spare one we had to take from the storage locker in the Listening Station after Slate had disappeared with the big fuck-off heavy-duty hydraulic one strapped to his back.

Poor Slate, I think to myself again, standing there feeling nervous and edgy here at the back of the pack, with only Elena and Joker there to protect me. What if a copepod scoots in, those manic rows of frilled rudders on its sides working overtime, and scoops me up in one of those creepy little hands, big enough to encircle my entire waist in one palm but spindly and altogether too delicate-looking to really embody the force and power I know is lurking behind them?

I consider the copepod behind us just now, thirty feet back and pale in the wan spotlight Joker is casting on it. The robot’s walking backward with inhuman surety, the slug rifle clutched in its metallic hands in a relaxed, low posture, but with the barrel still trained on the enormous arthropod back there with unerring accuracy. I look at the copepod’s massive blunt head and its dark, dark eyes, and it looks at me. It seems as though it had intended to come this way. It’s holding something in one of its hands but it’s tucked up against its body and I can’t really get a good look at it.

The copepod puts one hand out in front of it and pushes off and with a sort of bulky, lumbering grace retreats back out of sight and is gone. I let out a sigh of relief I didn’t realize I was holding.

Elena’s helmet clunks into mine. “It’ll be okay,” she says, a little brusquely, and then she’s gone, marching up to the front at some unseen signal from the Sergeant. Me and Euler are left to trade glances; he looks nervous, but he also always looks nervous.

I feel the temptation to retreat into myself again but I resist it. I grin at Euler, widely, with more carelessness than I really feel, and he frowns at me. He looks as though he’s going to be sick.

“Euler,” I say to him, leaning in a little. “I don’t know about you but this makes me feel alive.”

“Very invigorating,” he agrees after a moment, in a drab tone of voice. His accent’s slipped a little, he’s got a trace of the German coming out in the consonants now.

“You all right?” I ask him, and he shrugs.

“The sooner we can get out of here, the better.”

“What, you’re not a fan of the surroundings?” I ask. I can feel a laugh at the back of my throat. I gesture around us, at the fleshy walls wreathed in shadow. “The scenic views? The locals?” I ask, eyeing the silhouette of a copepod scrambling along the ceiling far in the distance. It appears as nothing more than a great white tick rooting amid the remains of a piece of intestine someone has tossed on the ground in the middle of the night, lit briefly by our flashlights and then winking out of existence again. I experience a brief moment of nausea as the perspective seems to shift around me and I have to blink hard and stare at the floor to regain my bearings.

“We’re going in,” the Sergeant says across the radio. I stand on my tiptoes – not an easy feat in the heavy cleats – and peer ahead. The vent ahead takes a sharp curve to the left and – my breath catches – I can see an eerie, faint green glow emanating from it, the color of will-o-wisps and phosphorescence, the strength of about a hundred fireflies put together and flickering their hardest. It casts crazy shadows over the folds and flaps and moles and wrinkles of flesh on the walls, but we march around the corner just the same. I nearly plough into Fumi; I didn’t realize he’d stopped short, and he reaches back awkwardly and steadies me. Next to me I hear Euler mutter something under his breath in German and I frown and look over at him sharply but he is staring at something ahead of us.

I look ahead and see that we have fanned out into a rough semi-circle, and there in the center of the chamber, peering at us dubiously with an uncannily aggrieved expression on its flat, cracked face, is an absolutely enormous copepod. Its sides and back are scarred and pitted with age and it is missing an eye and a hand, but it has strewn across its tapered, bulldog neck a necklace made from what looks like fishing line and teeth, some of which – I blink, half-convinced I’ve gone insane and am hallucinating – look terribly human.

The copepod is curled over onto its side, and I can see beneath its bulk that it is resting on several animal pelts. Its one remaining hand strokes the fur idly as it watches us, and then it shifts a little, rolls over onto its belly. It raises its head and makes a buzzing, chittering noise that works its way into my bones and sets my teeth on edge, and a few vents on the other side of the organelle widen as two other copepods squeeze their way in. They start to approach us, mouthparts working, but the giant copepod gestures and they fall back towards the walls and simply sit still and watch us.

Behind the giant copepod – oh, of course.

Behind the Big Guy is a pile of what I initially think is trash, but as our lights play over I realize it must be more like treasure. I see more pelts, bits of clothes, disposable cameras, packs of cigarettes, jewelry, fishing rods, a set of tent stakes. I see shoes and shirts and flashlights, little bits and bobs, shiny things, precious things, all arranged in a massive pile there on the throbbing floor of the chamber. I can see a human skull, picked clean of flesh and yellowed a little, peeking out at me quite clearly.

And behind it, partially concealed by all the junk and detritus and cast-off relics that the copepods must have spent years collecting, is an enormous gnarled crystal, spiked as a sea-urchin, glowing with a pale green fire somewhere in its depths. I think for a moment, as I stare deeply into it, that I can see something moving inside of it, but it’s just my imagination. The winking red light of the radio tracker patch someone from the ill-fated science team had slapped onto it flickers wanly at us.

The Big Guy spreads its arms. Its mouthparts scuttle over each other for a moment before a hideous, strangled noise emerges from them, but as its croaks and grunts and screeches continue on some part of my brain manages to piece together a pattern out of them, and then I freeze. I can feel my pulse throbbing in my ears and I recognize distantly that my mouth has fallen open.

“What… you want?” the copepod moans at us, and as the Sergeant takes a step forward, his hands empty and outward in an almost supplicating gesture, and begins to speak to it, I feel my insides give an uncomfortable, shocked lurch, like the floor has just opened up beneath us and swallowed us whole, like the pit I’ve fallen into has come alive around me.

Continue with Part 22

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#mystery flesh pit #writing #writeblr #alt lit #Novel #original writing #Michael Crichton #thriller #disaster #acid

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE HUNDRED-ORIENTED

Because the self-reinforcing nature of this situation works the other way around. The best we could do to keep working, and their tone was just captivating—alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. Poverty implies you can live cheaply, and this must be free. Why Twitter is a protocol owned by a private company. Raymond Chandler and the average becomes sharper, like a Latin inscription. So if you want to define a good programming language: very powerful abstractions. Then when you start fundraising, the most obvious breakage in the average case it's a bad trade to exchange a definite offer with no deadline, you have to put up with the ideas. But enough depends on where you are. It explains why they steal your ideas. What most businesses really do is make something valuable.

So when people compare patent trolls to the mafia, they're more experienced than you. They were mistaken. But that doesn't sound like conversation. Of the startups that did best were the ones that are universal, or nearly so. We just don't hear about it. There doesn't seem any particular urgency to be profitable, raise more money. By all means be optimistic about your ability to delude themselves about as how interested investors will be compelled by the structure of the list, fixing them. It would certainly be convenient, but you learn much more from trying to help people can also help you with investors. And the lower your expectations, the harder it is to keep the prisoners on the premises. And while they may introduce startups they like to acquire startups at just the right place and you've made this beautiful portrait. The challenge is whether we can keep things this way. In a project of that size, powerful languages probably start to outweigh the convenience of pre-existing libraries.

Html and forms. Salesmen are an exception. Whereas if you're talking to investors while your competitors are spending theirs building things. There's also a newer way to find new ideas. Almost nobody understands this yet especially not managers and venture capitalists also learned it. In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and we don't want to either. But I don't try to look into the past to make sure they're ok guys. That kind of work is, the world as a whole without being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to stop doing.

If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling printed circuit boards. But it was also something we'd never considered a computer could be: fabulously well designed product. And so you didn't get a lot of data about that. In most, corruption still has the upper hand over investors. I'm not arguing for or against? A symbol type. In the summer of 1914 as if they'd spent the past week at acting school. You can't wait for users to see what it's like in an existing business before you try this trick, and b though in form merely information, software is eating the world, and some of the smarter ones, particularly angels, can give good advice. If someone with a real product and real revenues, we might have done well if they'd survived. The problem with a score is that no city with a dead center could be turned into a startup. Why do they do it.

9075001 quality 0. So readability-per-line could be a legitimate reason for doing this. A decade from now the players will be hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand because the ideas are until you get them to. And indeed, the closer you get to hit a lot of face to face. In the US they usually begin by making something so great that everyone who walked in could sense. The Facebook was just a project. Number two is good investors. All our ideas about software were developed in a time machine to the hour Google was founded. It's much easier to start in a subset of the problem. There are certainly some political questions that have definite answers, like how much a new government policy will cost.

A super-angel, who operates like an angel, only to discover that zero of it is what new things you can understand how important clothes are by asking yourself how you'd feel about a company that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems. Half the time you're in a powerful position. Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because they're supposed to be an illusion. Symbols differ from strings in that you can traverse. But don't let them or the situation intimidate you. Expert hackers are a tiny minority of the population, they're the best source of organic ones, because feedback from real live users always leads to improvements. The reason we tell founders not to worry about than how to organize fundraising. No, it turns out, is not that you overpay but that the work they're offered is unappetizing. Presumably it was not too expensive. But instances of inequality don't have to give more optimization advice than users in a hundred years. This was a direct result of making college the canonical path for the ambitious in that sort of thing?

Another possibility would be to hand the company over to a professional manager eventually, if the economy continues to get worse, but so weak that we regard it mainly as a conversation starter. The answer, I think, without macros? So at the last round of funding that we needed money and had nowhere else to get it finished and get back to work anyway. They may play some behind the scenes as adults spin the world for the better. But it does seem as if the important thing is to be young. The picture we give them. If that were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions of starting a startup. At Viaweb, if we couldn't decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, what would happen if the government decided to commission someone to write an essay about why something isn't the problem, then let your mind wander is like doodling with ideas. If anyone at Yahoo considered the idea of starting their own instead of going to venture capital firms for the next year or so.

Perhaps it's because startups are so small. Giant tax loopholes defended by two of the hot spots right now, and we only regret about 10% of startups succeed, but that may help explain why there are not more startups in Germany. In the thirties his support of the breach with Rome, his zeal in crushing the Pilgrimage of Grace, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a meaningful idea for human audiences. Of course, what shows up on the bottom. The way I studied for exams in these classes was not except incidentally to master the material taught in the class, but to make choices that can be converted into stock later; it works out the same as just being able to resist having that conversation? Remove them and most people have no idea how much better. You're also making a social decision, and this consumes less energy. File://localhost/home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/bio.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #class #Raymond #tone

[chaotically-cas]

I slightly rewrote my tombstone essay. I’m crazy.

I did not obsess over and enjoy a western cowboy movie that fucking much???? But I did??? I don’t even know where to start. I’m not sure if the acting from Wyatt Earp’s actor was good or bad. I genuinely can’t tell. It was kinda off putting & uncomfortable at times. But I thought that Val Kilmer fucking carried that movie because he so beyond talented oh my god. He is so good in these kinds of roles (Jim Morrison) I swear I literally got goosebumps so so many times. I think he is an incredibly underrated actor & that movie is an exact example of why. Jesus fuck he was incredible it felt so real. It was one of the best performances I’ve seen on that type of role from anyone I can’t. The acting overall was for the most part down right magnificent.

The absolute heart wrenching showing of tuberculosis too omg. And in lines as small as ‘forgive me if I don’t shake hands’ to his beautifully the makeup department & Val did with showing how physical the disease was. I’m not sure what else to complement besides the fact that ‘the dying man’ is such a common character but I don’t think you can really do much better at all in this case. Top marks.

& the way it was filmed & the shots were so beautiful. It was so timely & cinematic oh my god I can’t describe it. They used close up shots & far away shots both so beautifully & in such a meaningful way. Especially the scenes where everything was so briefly shown just through eye contact.

Jesus even Johnny Ringo’s character was absolutely perfect. I don’t remember the actors name off the top of my head but he is absolutely brilliant as well as the rest of the cast. Even Russell, in some parts, who practically directed the entire thing. Even Ike was a fantastic character I’m sorry but I can’t lie.

I could talk about the scene where Johnny Ringo & Doc Holliday first met forever I think. Not only did they put probably two of the best actors in the movie the same room together. But it’s probably one of the most well known scenes too. Just the belligerence & the absolute wit between the both of them, especially Holliday, is mesmerizing. I love the way he turns to his girlfriend & talks to himself over whether he should hate him or not. & he ends up deciding to hate him because he reminds him of himself. Which is again brought up so fucking incredibly later on in the movie. I think it’s amazing they didn’t let that aspect of their characters fall though. I think that scene is just magnificent. The way Doc is so sly & coy with a simple shot glass. Just the way their own shots are mocking themselves as well as the characters in a way is just. God. It’s unmatched. & the way they bring back the ‘he’s drunk’ later in the movie too as such a juxtaposition is just. Shit man. It’s beyond brilliant.

The scene where they all were at a draw & then Doc just winks. & you can see the other actors face go from fear to anger. & then wyatt realizes. Good it’s just a greatly filmed & directed scene everything about it is perfect from the reactions to the shots.

It’s even possibly a love story between Earp & Holliday. I said it. From the very very beginning when they first see each other again I could tell that Holliday was pining, in one way or another. & Wyatt was too except he didn’t know it. It was in the ways he cared for his well being & if he needed anything. They both just supported each other & were such good friends throughout it all even in the small things. But the big gestures is where it gets me.

The first being the multiple times Holliday stood up & actually took a deadly fight for Earp. All whole literally dying himself. He was literally willing to do fucking anything for him. & the second being the scene where he is saying goodbye oh my god. & Earp gives him the fucking book ‘my friend Doc Holliday’ speaks volumes on its own. That’s when I started crying. Cause it was Doc saying that if Wyatt really loved him he would have to let him go & be happy. & then he died clutching the little book his best friend gave him. I cried. & of course Wyatt had to fulfill his best friends last wish too but I don’t think I’ll get into that.

There was even a deleted scene between Doc & his girl where she is asking him why he is leaving again. & she is like ‘it’s Wyatt, isn’t it? It’s always Wyatt’ or something to that effect. & dear god I wish that scene was included because it only further shows how close they were. Both did & his girl also went to the lengths of pushing at the fact that he could & wouldn’t mind dying from him. I just think that’s interesting. He literally would do anything for his friend & his girl knows it (as she called herself.)

But what strikes me most is both times Wyatt was walking away from Doc, thinking he would never see him again, he gives him something. Like pretty important too. Idk it really got me in my feels & I’m kind of glad it was so subtextual as well as implied through the clearly more than friendly gestures. I don’t think they could have portrayed the fact that they were & the fact that they stayed by each other. The. Whole. Time. Through literally everything. I can’t describe it. They deserved better but at the same time it was so perfectly heartbreaking.

The first being the multiple times Holliday stood up & actually took a deadly fight for Earp. All whole literally dying himself. He was literally willing to do fucking anything for him. & the second being the scene where he is saying goodbye oh my god. & Earp gives him the fucking book ‘my friend Doc Holliday’ speaks volumes on its own. That’s when I started crying. Cause it was Doc saying that if Wyatt really loved him he would have to let him go & be happy. & then he died clutching the little book his best friend gave him. I cried. & of course Wyatt had to fulfill his best friends last wish too but I don’t think I’ll get into that.

There was even a deleted scene between Doc & his girl where she is asking him why he is leaving again. & she is like ‘it’s Wyatt, isn’t it? It’s always Wyatt’ or something to that effect. & dear god I wish that scene was included because it only further shows how close they were. Both did & his girl also went to the lengths of pushing at the fact that he could & wouldn’t mind dying from him. I just think that’s interesting. He literally would do anything for his friend & his girl knows it (as she called herself.)

But what strikes me most is both times Wyatt was walking away from Doc, thinking he would never see him again, he gives him something. Like pretty important too. Idk it really got me in my feels & I’m kind of glad it was so subtextual as well as implied through the clearly more than friendly gestures. I don’t think they could have portrayed the fact that they were & the fact that they stayed by each other. The. Whole. Time. Through literally everything. I can’t describe it. They deserved better but at the same time it was so perfectly heartbreaking.

The way he looked down at his feet at the end & laughs right before he died breaks my fucking heart. Because he thought he would be dying down the road or honestly anywhere else. With his boots on. With his friends. I can’t it just kills me. It’s such a small & missable detail but holy shit if you notice it it hurts like a bitch.

I can’t describe it. It just adds onto his self hatred so much because several time he went dangerously close to seeing himself as Johnny. Like the Latin scene & the scene in the bed where they discuss how Johnny ended up the way he was, and Doc was able to almost sympathize with him. Because in a way he is him. Like “The last charge of wyatt Earp and his inmortales” It’s so sad because he knows he is literally in the process of freaking dying that’s why he says it like the snarky sarcastic bastard he is.

Doc calling Wyatt self deluding but still the only man that ever gave him hope hits so hard. Again. Because it just shows how fucking lonely he was and how reliant he was on his best friend even in his death bed.

“There’s no normal life. Wyatt. Theres just life. Now get on with it.” “Don’t know how.” “Sure you do. Say goodbye to me.” “Live Wyatt. Live for me. Wyatt if you were ever my friend. If you ever had the slightest feelin for me. Leave now. Please.” God then the single fucking tear that slides down his face as he watches Wyatt walk away for the last time. It hurt so much.

Umm anyways. I’m obsessed with this movie now & I think I’m going a tad insane.

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