The Cancel Culture thread! WOO!

[kitten]

"...but there are still too many pronouns"

you misread what i said and entirely missed the point of what i was saying. but thanks, of course, for the sanctimonious condescension and grade school finger wagging (complete with constant italics for emphasis so that i can feel especially like an 8yo).

when i said "political powerlessness," i am referring to that of the individual and their ability to affect change on a scale greater than their immediate surroundings. one's reaction to that must be disengagement from the meta, not further investment in it. i wouldn't advocate voting at all in a shitshow as unethical and vile and staged as american politics, but if it helps you sleep better at night, if, somehow, i did, i certainly wouldn't vote republican. my statement there is meant to advocate to anyone for anyone over-investing (on either """side""", because the "contemporary american left" is definitely just as invested in continuing a decrepit empire that makes no one happy) to "touch grass."

p.s. i am a trans person who uses she/they pronouns, you flagrant retard. seriously, get fucked. christ, you were eager to drop that one, weren't you? i just spent a gigantic block of text up there talking about how i'm a serial child molestation victim with c-ptsd raised in the south, too. i am the picture fucking image of what i'm sure you'd like to imagine is who you're helping when you make these useless posts.

[BulletMagnet]

if, somehow, i did, i certainly wouldn't vote republican.

The point of my post, as well as numerous others I've made along the same lines, is that a lot of people in similar situations to yours - not you specifically - do vote GOP, directly against their own interests, and do so consistently - and because the folks they vote for, surprise, keep winning and doing pretty much whatever they please to the rest of us, what they don't get to do is pretend the state of affairs somehow has nothing to do with them, and that they're powerless to do anything about it. Yes, there are certainly "big things" that neither party is doing much to address, but acting as if literally nothing ever changes no matter who votes for whom is, to recycle a phrase from before, either staggeringly ignorant or taking the piss.

christ, you were eager to drop that one, weren't you?

You're presumably aware that I did so not to offend you specifically, but because it's very much the go-to line for the sorts of people I describe above, the key variation of "my country is being taken away from me" or "I don't recognize my town anymore" - if you should be angry and offended at anything, it's how frequently the folks you insist "sanctimonious" sorts like myself should be doing more to engage with are openly using people like yourself as boogeymen and excuses to make decisions that will directly harm you and numerous others, not the fact that I was so dreadfully rude to point that out.

[kitten]

but acting as if literally nothing ever changes no matter who votes for whom is, to recycle a phrase from before, either staggeringly ignorant or taking the piss.

you think i haven't been fucked by politicians? that my life hasn't been dictated by being fucked by them and that i'm unaware of this? you imagine my not voting is apathy? it's antipathy. a god damn decision not to participate in this shitshow. i'm not going to cast a vote for "slightly better" - i'd rather my fucking throat get slit by someone who actually has the guts to say they hate me no matter how arbitrary the reason than stuff my nose in the behind of a mealy-mouthed liberal coward whose entourage will scold me for not 'participating.' not voting is at least a much of a decision as voting.

it's how frequently the folks you insist "sanctimonious" sorts like myself should be doing more to engage with are openly using people like yourself as boogeymen and excuses to make decisions that will directly harm you and numerous others, not the fact that I was so dreadfully rude to point that out.

eat shit you stupid mother fucker. not about to sit here and be lectured on who the tranny should listen to lest she get wot's comin to 'er. i'd get on your case for obvious transphobia if it wasn't so dead obvious you'd bold-facedly say this to a 'real' woman, too. i live in the south. i go out in public. you don't fucking know how hard i try to bridge gaps, how much i deeply, intimately know how these people are afraid of me.

for christ's sake, bm, do you think i don't interact with people? do you think i don't experience death threats and bigotry? are you seriously acting like i don't fucking know what i'm doing, like i'm a mouth-agape retard wandering into the jaws of my own death? this absolutely jarringly asinine willingness to characterize someone saying "disengage from broad politics and talk to people" as a helpless dolt voting for their own death is beyond odious, beyond abased. i cannot possibly exhibit an anger close to what you deserve, i do not possess the capacity to think as little of someone as you apparently do of me, but i will gladly take a ban over listening to you talk to me this way.

[Durandal]

you think i haven't been fucked by politicians? that my life hasn't been dictated by being fucked by them and that i'm unaware of this? you imagine my not voting is apathy? it's antipathy. a god damn decision not to participate in this shitshow. i'm not going to cast a vote for "slightly better" - i'd rather my fucking throat get slit by someone who actually has the guts to say they hate me no matter how arbitrary the reason than stuff my nose in the behind of a mealy-mouthed liberal coward whose entourage will scold me for not 'participating.' not voting is at least a much of a decision as voting.

I don't understand this either/or framing of the situation. Shouldn't it be possible to push for change both inside and outside the democratic framework simultaneously? Populist politicians know the value of loyal paramilitary groups with optional plausible deniability all too well, for one.

Speaking from a pure cost-benefit analysis perspective, if the act of voting is low-commitment enough (depending on the state and its degree of voter suppression), then having the option for voting for harm reduction--however marginal--should at the very least be a net positive action at little cost (even when nothing comes out of it), probably leaving you enough time and energy to continue enacting local direct action without relying on politicians. The average liberal likes to smugly remind you that "you should have just voted harder" if you don't see the change you desire implemented (and sour any feelings you have about going to the ballots in the future), but to then in response drop out of the game altogether seems unnecessarily and self-destructively prideful/spiteful--or "owning the libs", if you will.

Whatever your feelings on the current state of the American political apparatus, it is still a relevant (albeit increasingly immobile) mechanism for influencing aspects of society and the individual as the hijinks around Supreme Court nominees showed. Given how much of a stranglehold it still has, it shouldn't--and can't--be truly disengaged from quite yet. But, it is only one front out of many, one that right now can mostly only be played to draw out losses for buying more time in other hopefully more promising fronts--something that you said you were investing into already--as opposed to adhering to the narrow liberal voter worldview where elections are the only relevant front there is.

To then willingly cede that front completely to those who wish to put das Pedal on das Metall, even though participation against costs relatively little, seems rather wasteful. I'd at least understand if you were arguing from an accelerationist or some 4D political chess perspective, but since it doesn't seem that way, I can only scratch my head in confusion. Like you said, it's always a bit of both; politicking influences interactions between commonfolk, and vice versa. Completely disengaging oneself from either is setting oneself up for failure, even if doing otherwise would mean that the liberals would gloat "See, we told you voting helps, didn't we?".

[BulletMagnet]

Before I respond to your most recent post I think we need to revisit my original reply to you at the bottom of the previous page, because its intent, at the very least, seems to have been rather badly misconstrued.

In short, I disagreed with you on a single item, namely the notion that American conservatism has any legitimate claim to a sense of "disempowerment"; the right can claim to "feel" put-upon as much as it likes, but in sheer, tangible terms of elections won and prerogatives enacted it simply hasn't had a leg to stand on to that end for nearly half a century, and likely the foreseeable future on top of that (and moreover, as you well know, will frequently cite "you can even see two men kissing on TV these days!" as total, unassailable "justification" for what they "feel"). That's literally it; how that eventually led to you calling me (among other things) transphobic I'm honestly still a bit baffled by.

More to the point, methinks, when I said that anyone espousing such a line was either ignorant or not acting in good faith, I was not referring to you, but to, I think it's safe to assume, quite a few of the people you say you've made an effort to talk to in spite of their open antipathy for who you are; I never intended to so much as suggest that you shouldn't be talking to them at all, nor that you are foolish or self-destructive to do so.

I do, however, stand by my perhaps poorly-worded advice to you, insofar as when you hear the people you seek out cast themselves as somehow politically oppressed, they are doing so not only from a position of either ignorance or malice, but also, no matter how vehemently they may deny it, from a position of power. How either you or they feel about any of this does not change that fact, and for whatever it's worth I think you would, to whatever extent you're not already doing so, be well-served to keep it firmly in mind, whatever approach you plan to take.

i will gladly take a ban over listening to you talk to me this way.

First, no, I do not intend to ban you. Second, a brief query: you don't need to post an answer here, but I would ask you to give it a moment of honest thought. If our roles were reversed, and you were the mod and I the regular poster, at this point in our conversation would you have already taken it upon yourself to ban me?

i'm not going to cast a vote for "slightly better" - i'd rather my fucking throat get slit by someone who actually has the guts to say they hate me no matter how arbitrary the reason than stuff my nose in the behind of a mealy-mouthed liberal coward whose entourage will scold me for not 'participating.'

For one thing, if we're talking specifically about trans issues you have a very different definition of "slightly better" than I do. For another, not to put too fine a point on it, but if things continue in this neck of the woods the way they're going now, such a statement may well become more than hypothetical before long. Hopefully you've given such a possibility a good deal of thought as you decide the best path forward for yourself.

[kitten]

Speaking from a pure cost-benefit analysis perspective

first, foremost - i really appreciate being asked these questions in good faith and some curiosity toward my perspective.

it is not that hard to vote, you're right about that. and i don't bemoan people active in local elections, local politics - but what do you do to send the message that politicians in your area are not doing enough? what do you do when the vote to ostensibly make your life a little less hard carries with it many things that make your life harder, that makes life harder for almost everyone you know? in the instance where there's a swing vote and i am directly pressed to a hot plate and it's die or sizzle, how many times do i choose 'sizzle' before i'd rather the person who put me on the hot plate just fucking kill me or not? when do i stop tolerating not just 'not enough', but active suffering no matter what i choose? voting comes along with it an extremely bizarre culture that you should as well as it does the idea there is a group that is more your friend and a group that is less your friend. it's not that i'm eager for my corpse to become a catalyst, but i'd rather be killed - for my own sake, bereft of what change it could cause - turning the other cheek. this may seem like i'm reducing things to an either/or, but hear me out:

the reality is that that most people don't actually vote for much more than a couple of impulsive reasons or causes, and those causes are always attached to a demonic parasite. that parasite is not even the politician, who might be just as sadly deluded as you (the general "you," not you, specifically) are, but the very mechanism of perpetual suffering that we think is american politics. this amorphous entity with no body or mind that we all bow down to, that many of us pretend to see and hear, but is more false than any god. at some point, it becomes very deeply easy to see people voting the other way as enemies, to see people voting the same way as friends, to see people not voting as somehow worse than anyone because they possess no conviction. i think we can safely agree that no matter how wrong i might be perceived to be, i am certainly not lacking conviction, certainly not lacking a history to establish it. the amount of hand-wringing i have seen from fellow trans people all across the spectrum of class and wealth that "if you didn't vote blue, you literally elected trump" was fucking astonishing. people asking you to block them if you couldn't get off your ass to do what they will eagerly characterize as the simplest thing in the world. people who are ostensibly 'my' people, ostensibly 'my' friends, ostensibly 'my' 'community.' at each others' throats, wishing for each others' real, actual death, crying to god to please stop being faced with those doing it wrong, who don't really care, who will just hurt them - and being deeply, horribly misguided over who those people are.

at some point in any abusive relationship, you leave. eventually, enough is enough. paying attention to the minute differences between two flavors of suffering for even one second is too much. ten seconds is agonizing. a minute is torture. participation in a two-party system ultimately leads to this. "liberals" have no interest in changing. voting for them is still sending the signal that they can do just a teensy tiny, little bit more, and then we can coast forever on no change. roe v wade getting overturned is like christmas for democrats, it's back to campaigning on basic human rights while the middle class is eroded into non-existence. that's enough to get people to go the polls. that's enough to get people to believe it's the side that 'cares about human rights' versus the side that doesn't. at some point, you take a friend arguing for the sanctity of conception on bad faith, and you're charged against them, they're charged against you. likewise, at some point, the floor is eroded from underneath as you learn to vote more and more on the easiest thing they can get you to vote with while the non-choices begin to represent narrower and narrower interests. by mother fucking design, you don't (read: no one) even know what the fuck you're voting for, but you think you know enough that probably it's the better decision. people voting for trump aren't the dumbest people on the planet, they're people backed into a corner who, when pressed to making one of two choices (because not voting is not an option, or so i am often told), picked the one guy who has conviction in something, even if that conviction is evil. at least the mother fucker believes in something.

voting, intrinsically, is not such a bad thing. in small groups, in deeply local senses, democracy does do something and i am not against it as political instrument. but the larger the scale, the greater people's unknowing of what their 'doing' actually is. at some point, you create what we have now: a binary system dictating two slightly different versions of reality to millions of people, arguably billions with how much american politics affect the globe. and the local level is subservient to the higher levels, piggybacks off of them, often campaigns on how much they agree with that bigger person. i live in east tennessee, i watched most super-conservative politicians down here win over more moderate and compassionate options because they'd say "maga" confidently. i watched women do this - both vote and campaign for it. trump is for women, i watched neighbors believe, somehow. i watched the process by which they felt that man became the only thing that stood up for them.

the "cost/benefit" here is that i: waste my time and energy and attention and love and goodwill. and i get: more things that will do that. why do i participate in this? why? why do i participate in a contest that enables my continued suffering? that enables people like our dear, hopelessly retarded bulletmagnet to think he's doing something for the rights of 'people like me' when he tells 'people like me' that i don't know what i'm doing and that i'm walking into the jaws of those who would consume me? he sure as shit doesn't look ever look like he learned to be happy in the years i've seen him posting this kind of uselessly superior, petulant drivel (he does look smug, sure), but he just as surely learned to talk to someone who has taken actual beatings to the face by people who hate her as though she's a lamb ignorant of the lion she's lain with. oh, if ONLY his education could spare me my own suffering! my real, actual beatings and rape taught me nothing! what a generous thing it is, actually, to talk down to me. i have probably never been closer to losing my permission to post on this forum than spitting on the hall monitor whose job it is to tepidly bait the chuds out until they say something stupid enough to get chucked. i imagine, however, it's a 'bad look' to ban the most vociferous tranny on the forum in the "cancel culture" thread and it wasn't even actually considered. all fucks like him can do is scold, which no one wants to fucking hear. that, and grow more and more emboldened that the other aisle is worse and begin to see it in more and more places.

my neighbors, who are people who don't vote for liberalism, but will smile with me, talk with me, worry about me when i'm ill, pray for me when i'm in danger, offer to help me in times of need... and who will get to learn about a group of people who are not actually that different from them if i reciprocate these things - are they better or worse than that? voting (in a two-party system, yes) doesn't change minds, it institutes a system that actively encourages animosity and distance on local levels. and i know, yes, i could vote and make friends and be kind. i could probably do all the things i say are good and helpful and still, when it comes down to a very crucial contest, participate in the election and 'make a difference.' but i don't want to. i don't think the kind of voting available to me makes friends or spreads kindness. and i vote for what i want: no more of this. there is no one campaigning for even a fraction of enough of my interests. voting independent comes with the exact same admonishment that i can't possibly ever do or change anything.

i'm not saying that "paying attention is a slippery slope," i'm not saying that i'd rather suffer or die than vote, i'm saying that voting is a gateway to personal hell that i've spent too much of my life in. it possesses more than a capacity to radicalize, it possesses a capacity to create apathy. i am not fucking apathetic. i am not so beaten so that i am to the point i give up and compromise and go "yes, this was enough to get me to participate." i am going to die whether i vote or not. maybe if i do not vote long enough, people will finally present a candidate that is fighting hard enough to get me "off my lazy ass." but i really don't think someone saying as much as i am to one specific person is a "lazy ass." it would be easier to just go and vote. please let this be a testament to how much i care about changing minds about me, i put this level of energy into nearly every damn thing i do. please also let it be a testament that i've done my due diligence in thinking about my decision. probably, people who wish for change and vote do wind up voting with the same hope: if they pray hard enough, god will listen to them. but i want my hope, my prayers, my wishes and desires be put into people who i can see and touch. the system that encourages me to vote encourages me to look at many of those people as not just my enemy, but a threat to my existence. if i can't trust my friends, family, and neighbors, i'd rather cut out the middleman and pray straight to god to change them.

it's easier to convince the person next door to not kill me than it is to convince the person in town hall to make the person next door be deprived of their ways of doing so. i have probably convinced several people who do vote that who they are voting for does not represent their interests. i've probably instigated more change than locking myself in a room in fear of everyone surrounding me and then once a year going down to push a button to make sure don't get permission to blow my head off if they have sex with me (if, somehow, you aren't familiar with the trans panic defense, i suggest becoming familiar with it) or what the fuck ever. i have started more conversations than i can count with "i don't vote, here's why" that would have never, ever happened if when asked who i voted for, i said "the blue guy." and i would have gotten bogged deep down in the murk of convincing the other person that this person is more in their interest instead of talking to them about how the guy they voted for isn't their interest. their interests aren't mine, but if i'm in their interest, then their interests involve me (and vice versa). my next door neighbor and her husband are literally red-voters in an actual biker gang with a 'don't tread on me' sticker on their truck (yes, really), but they've helped me in a number of ways and been a reliable, kind, and useful presence in my life. a kind presence i wouldn't have if i had been more interested in scolding them than agreeing with or understanding their gripes and commiserating them. i fucking guarantee to you that when they see another tranny, now, they are considerably less likely to think ill of them.

i will "get involved" and "vote for my interests" when that is reciprocated by politicians. not voting en masse creates an outcry that the existing parties aren't reflecting voter interests, which dislodges them from the vacuum they're occupying. i want both parties gone or completely overhauled or to actually have competition, and i don't get that by voting for one of them. i'm not even asking for that much before i would cast a ballot, but if you consistently watch "blue" destroy its own candidates whose policies could actually institute real change, what the fuck am i even doing other than letting them know they're doing something right by casting my vote? it's not that i don't care. as someone whose very identity is a debate held by the elite as a major issue right now: i fucking guarantee you, i care a lot. every action, every refusal of action is a choice, and i can promise you i am making mine with considered deliberation.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

would you have already taken it upon yourself to ban me?

yeah, man, i'd have put my boot on and taken you out in the street, then made you kiss the curb like you would your mother. i'd have then cracked down on the small of your neck with my heel as the ball of my foot made contact with the rear of your skull with such astonishing force that the impact of your teeth shattering and jaw splitting open on the concrete would cause me to instinctively giggle at the incomprehensible absurdity of the loss of human life represented by the flash of red in my eyes. i'd have shivered in cold, unexamined, pure delight as the truth of exercised authority's reality made my wish for you to shut your stupid fucking mouth came true. i'd thank god for the opportunity to relish this moment by making us both flesh and smile and smile and smile so widely and for so long it would never leave my countenance ever again. i'd be born again into the next life with that same eternal glee.

oh, hold up, wait, that's what's what you want me to be afraid of happening to me if i don't believe in the necessity of my participation in authority. sorry, i don't know how to respond to threats. (no, i would not ban you, you fucking idiot. i am not waiting for my opportunity to wear the boot, i'm against the concept of "the boot")

bm - i would call you talking to anyone how you're talking to me "phobic" of what they are. call it human-phobic, if you want. for christ's sake, to fucking repeat myself: no, i do not believe "american conservatism" is "powerless," and the idea that i have to explain to you that this is not what i believe fills me with such genuine dread that i do not know if i can make any sense to you, whatsoever. how the fucking hell can i say that much for you to arrive at that basic misunderstanding? what on earth could i say to get you to begin to understand me? i believe that in today's society, people are powerless, and that the participation in this machine (of which "american conservatism" is a face of) is what engenders the machine to power over us.

i have talked to the "too many pronouns people," i am friends with a few "too many pronouns people." presenting to me the idea that those people (as if they're not individuals but an amorphous group who can only make ethical decisions as dictated to them by their caucus) are going to win if i don't go do whatever it is you think i should do is deeply, comically, ludicrously disrespectful to my lived experience. nobody wins when we settle for less and less and less and less and less of what we actually want. this is a lived experience you can probably fucking assume i've had by nature of already confessing my abuse and marginalization. the idea you're presenting a new idea to me is infuriating: this is my fucking lived reality. what can i do other than call you stupid as you wag your finger and present to me what's been presented to me my entire life as though it's news?

and by what measure do you hope to see these people - a group you cannot characterize without gesturing beyond their autonomy and to their inferior mode of authority - find their minds changed? by institution of a parallel authority that dismisses them until they become extinct? how's that working out for you? real well? super good? no? if you want to kill me, kill me, don't tell me those other guys are going to unless i shut up and vote. your belief in authority is a hell of a lot less likely to save you than me approaching my "enemy" on equal footing and with compassion and empathy. i'm not fucking bowing down to them and asking them to spare me, i'm having a chat and handing over an extra pizza slice and going "damn, shit sucks, let's not participate until we can enact change that we want." and in doing so, i enact change that i want - i'm no longer feared and i have a new friend. they get the fucking same, because that fear is the source of their ignorance and hatred. maybe when authority asks them to do their due diligence and that fear is stronger than my compassion, they split my jaw open, but i'll be happy i didn't break theirs, be happy i never prayed theirs be broken by a higher power, and at least be glad it was a person doing it and not my government eking away my living, piece by piece, under the guise that my voting is a god damned trolley problem.

who is asking me to approach that trolley lever, bm? you? or my neighbor? who is going to save me when someone comes to my home to kill me for fear of my identity? you? or my neighbor? i reject participation in this stupid game that lumps them in with a force that is after my life. i know many loyal, good people who would jump in front of a bullet for a person they saw pat their dog in a nice enough way. would you do that? or would you instead repeatedly insist that if i don't fight them, "they" win? nobody fucking wins when we treat the instrument of the machine (the person, the individual) as though they're just that instrument. they are a god damned human being and your insistence i view them divorced from that and by measure of their contribution to the reality that wants to kill me just creates that fucking reality. you represent force more to me than they do by telling me that if i don't join in, i'm minced meat. and you become this tool of the institution of this will that makes them feel you're their enemy by lumping them in either constituency. and then everyone makes a binary decision and everyone fucking fears everyone.

yes, i am risking my life. i am not the dumbest person to walk the face of the earth. but we all have to do that, eventually. i will risk it for the people next to me and not for some tawdry idealism that corrals people into a peg pen until they're so cramped they're choking to death on their own feces. i do my god damnedest to de-radicalize every opportunity i get, which is slow, which is meager, but which does bear fruit i can (AND DO) taste within my very own lifetime.

- - - -

you know what. okay. bm, to properly sum up my very obvious fury toward you, which i will not apologize for, which i'm not going to pretend is anything else: i spent hours writing about my trauma and difficult life and experiences on the previous page. my conclusion i state is that i think it's in everyone's interest to try to talk to people more and that enemies are dangerous, easy illusions to maintain so long as we're tricked into imagining this "bigger picture" that makes us lose sight of ourselves and what's right in front of our faces.

you then come in and oh so kindly and generously remind me: but kitten, those people are your enemy, they wish to eat you. do you know not of the institutions of power by which they do this?

after i talk about how i have been eaten for much of my life. by these people. how i want to remove them the machine that enables these wicked actions and behaviors.

what do you think i'm going to do? be like "oh, man, thanks. that's a perspective i hadn't considered. good warning?"

i would have eagerly accepted questions, curiosity, even surprise - but talking down to me like i hadn't just talked about how i consider these things? what do you expect me to do? shake your fucking hand? what is the purpose of your idiotic scolding?

[BulletMagnet]

for christ's sake, to fucking repeat myself: no, i do not believe "american conservatism" is "powerless," and the idea that i have to explain to you that this is not what i believe fills me with such genuine dread that i do not know if i can make any sense to you, whatsoever.

...I'll simply quote myself directly:

More to the point, methinks, when I said that anyone espousing such a line was either ignorant or not acting in good faith, I was not referring to you, but to, I think it's safe to assume, quite a few of the people you say you've made an effort to talk to in spite of their open antipathy for who you are

I seriously don't know what you think I'm even doing here. I'm not delegitimizing your perspective, nor your actions - as if I even could - even if they're not the ones I would take; the only reason I bothered to reply to your post in the first place was to push back against the notion that those who proudly count themselves among the unquestionably dominant political group in this country have just as much of a right to call themselves "marginalized" as the people their chosen leaders single out for persecution at their direct behest. Yes, in many ways they suffer the current state of affairs along with the rest of us, but like it or not the folks they invariably turn out for are the ones who have been pulling the levers of power for the vast majority of the time for quite awhile now, even if you choose to believe that it really doesn't matter who's at the helm as long as they're "part of the system".

If you think it's more productive to disengage from politics altogether and attempt to find common ground face-to-face, I wish you luck; heaven knows I'd like to believe that that's all it would really take. For both our sakes I'll refrain from wading back into the weeds and leave it at that.

[Mischief Maker]

it is not that hard to vote, you're right about that. and i don't bemoan people active in local elections, local politics - but what do you do to send the message that politicians in your area are not doing enough?

(202) 224-3121

[kitten]

but like it or not the folks they invariably turn out for are the ones who have been pulling the levers of power for the vast majority of the time for quite awhile now

yes! of course! but believing that this isn't what voting is - not who you vote for, but the process of participation in this alleged democracy we call america - is what i'm on about. "voting blue" is still voting for this hegemony's continued power, for the devil to keep working the lever, and sometimes in ways worse than the conservative option. it is voting for the same fucking institution. you're being as useful as someone going up to somebody saying "abolish the police, cops ruined my life and killed my dad" and saying "if you don't pick large, you're going to get supersized. good day to you." they mother fucking know, they watched it kill someone.

"please, no" is a valid option when someone asks if you want to burn or broil. in just one example: we spend more on medicare than any other country per person and our entire economy just becomes insurance companies making sure that money still gets spent because they're too worried we'll become anything other than too poor to ever survive without the government. tell me that's only the conservatives and i will scream. tell me obamacare wasn't about making sure this can't ever stop happening and i can dig up a million stories about lives made worse by their tax returns evaporating into thin air, their one opportunity to be a true american and afford a color television taken from them. tell me the completely insane road infrastructure problems in america were just the conservatives. did you know that other countries and governments exist? that many are happier and more ethical than america? that we're never going to get those playing our specific game of red vs. blue? two of my best buddies are brazilian and chilean hard leftists and they fucking love me talking about politics. i've many other leftist friends in other countries. it's only ever talking to american "progressives" or liberals that i hit the wall. maybe you're actually more wrong than the conservatives you think you dunk on, maybe who someone votes for is not a useful metric for judging someone's willingness to want better for themselves or society.

it is shit for everyone, even for those in power and their suffering at the hands of their own immense spiritual poverty and slow collapse of their empire. god knows trump was one of the most 'powerful' men on earth and never happier than you can get when yelling at somebody, which is a pretty low ceiling. biden's not particularly good at convincing me that he totally knows how to have fun, either. i mean... look at the guy. my argument is that release is individual, not through the hands of power and the creation of that power by broad pandering. like most people, we mostly agree, but you're absolutely not getting there by dropping in and telling me shit i know - everyone knows - and acting like you're not trying to draw a conclusion about how you're superior by dismissing one half and aligning with the other. my argument is that people i can actually talk to and change the world with is where i will put my politics.

"these people voted for this, though." hey, you did, too! and so do i every time i go to mcdonald's, am driven around in a car, or turn on an electronic device. but i was hardly ever given choice to do anything but these things to survive: i am given a "choice" to vote. i will utilize that choice and make a decision. that choice is: fuck this lol. we're all going to have to forgive ourselves for destroying everything, eventually, i might as well do that while i'm still alive and have fun at a 4th of july barbecue or whatever rather than thinking i'm "better than these people," which i'm not about to let you get away with thinking despite your slipperiest efforts. and PLEASE don't be like "actually, they think THEY'RE better than me! which is why i'm so perpetually impotent!"

real questions: what do you do to have fun? an extremely brief glance at your post history seems to be, uh... play touhou but make sure nobody thinks you really like it that much b/c it's lame? i'd respect you 100x times more if you told me about your reimu plushie collection, and i'm not joking. i'd believe you're doing something that actually makes you happy. does your posting on here for 15 years about the those damn fox news (now jordan peterson or probably those other two people mentioned earlier) listening rascals ruining the world make you have more fun? is this is somehow delightful for you? am i actually dumb as shit and you're having a super great time? any period in time i'm on here, i think that i am "only having an unproductive but dry fun" when i get wrapped up in these arguments, but i am "having a ton of fun" when i talk about how much i love games or anime or whatever. i think i hardly see you do this shit and you hardly seem to be having fun. my real fucking hang-up is that you seem sad (or at least bored) beyond my understanding, and my ability to tolerate it shattered when you thought you could teach me something about politics. i argue more on the rare occasions i show up because that's more and more what little remains. and then i bugger off and go do something. i get mad on here because this is all i fucking see.

i take durandal seriously because i presume he takes me seriously. i have seen him go on and on about his interests on here. i know him to be a guy i can expect something out of. if he thinks i'm wrong, i'd like to hear why. i enjoyed responding to his post, even if we're headed to a critical disagreement and i'm starting to spin my wheels. maybe he's going to drop an election in my district that mattered and make me think i should at least vote for mayor or deputy in my area or something. i'm willing to change and be changed in my conversation with him. he maybe has an almost identical position that you have against me, here, but how he presents himself is leagues apart.

- - - - - - - - - -

i did a quick experiment:

in your post history, you've used the word "love" in 409 of your 13,435 posts. not even a tenth of a smidge over 3%, or less than one in thirty-three posts. out of the last four times you've used it, none of them have been talking about something you love or your love.

in my post history, i've used the word "love" in 262 of my 1,062 posts. with a little round-up, that's 25%, or one in four of my posts. out of the last four times i've used it, all of them have been talking about something i love or my love. i'm a little ashamed i don't do it more often or don't only do it, but i can't help but pick a little bit at what ails me. i think i'm still mostly positive despite my negativity deluge. i've felt pretty appreciated when i talk about games or anime or etc. on here.

in the single one of those four posts i made not in this thread, i use the word 16 times (which only flags one of those 262 posts) mostly to suggest emphasis on something i enjoy. i'd be willing to bet i've typed the word more than the number of posts i've made and that i mean it the majority of the time in a real way talking about myself. in the other 3 of 4 mentioned posts, i use it at least a single time with genuine emphasis. please don't get hung up on the word choice, i'm not wanting to do exhaustive research about whose posts talk more about how they actually feel about cool stuff (presumably what forums are for?), but i am willing to bet i will whoop your ass. here's a quote from one of those threads:

what i love about this forum (and about forums, in general, as a broad concept when compared to other forms of what we now call 'social media') is threads like the side-scrolling action thread, where there's an abundance of good faith participation in mutual interests by people who are enthusiastic about what they love.

i don't know what you love. i only know that you post a lot about shit you don't. like, a whole fucking lot. constantly. i don't think you're making the world better or yourself happy and this is why i'm so aggressive about not giving your politics a single inch on me. please do not speak to me like i am a child while i'm talking passionately about my perspective on this shit and how i have become happier by embracing that perspective and then expect me to act like you're helping. you're not helping. i can and will pm orange808 or one of the other people you create circles in the floor talking either to or opaquely around and ask them to troll you in here. they often seem to be having a pretty good time without sacrificing their sincerity.

if you can pass the challenge of not mentioning anything political or biting at me and just telling me about something you give a fuck about in your next post, i will both appreciate and similarly end any other discussion. i will applaud a waifu statue or any other similarly embarrassing thing that you're proud you own, at this point. any fun i make will be in good faith, it's cool to like things. i'll let us both have a victory because that would be fun for me and probably fun for you. i would like to know you as someone other than your forum presence on here and i cannot emphasize the degree to which i mean that deeply seriously. i have no idea how to interpret you as something other than a sad scold - and that's probably a failure on my part - but, dude, i mean... come on, is posting in prelude to the apocalypse several times a day, every day, really doing you good? it is almost nothing for me to drop in here like a meteor and shake up some shit and type 20,000 words because there is obviously something seriously, deeply off with me and i tend to really enjoy that, but i get the feeling that like... it's scary if you DO care because i can't imagine what it is doing for you or anyone. and it's scary if you DON'T care because, man, that is some real dedication you have to not caring that feels a lot like it's actually caring.

i'm dead serious, btw, try me: post a cool picture of a thing you own - you don't even have to talk about it - and i will shut the fuck up about all this dumbass shit and talk about why i think it's cool. even if i think it's also kind of lame. a cd collection. some poetry you wrote. some fucking lego shit you built or something, i don't know, anything. i won't even be a prick and be like "thank you," subject will be completely changed.

it is not that hard to vote, you're right about that. and i don't bemoan people active in local elections, local politics - but what do you do to send the message that politicians in your area are not doing enough?

(202) 224-3121

lol. lmao, even.

and, you, little boy, what do you want for christmas?

MM, you're at least as confusing to me, if not more confusing because i'm pretty sure BM at least gets a bit real, sometimes. if you want to play the "you're the one trying harder" game with me, yes, i am. i like to try. i think that's probably what makes forums cool. effort. if you want to be an distant, smarmy cunt, go to 4chan. you'll have more fun and probably change more minds. this little snipe like you got me isn't funny and i hope to fucking god it isn't sincere.

"this system is too fucked to participate in." "ah, um, actually, have you tried *hyper-nasally* calling your senator?"

(you can participate in the same challenge, if you like. i will carry talking about whatever it is you post and respect your effort with total sincerity and you have my promise)

[BulletMagnet]

if you can pass the challenge of not mentioning anything political or biting at me and just telling me about something you give a fuck about in your next post, i will both appreciate and similarly end any other discussion.

Before I reply to this in earnest, I have one other question for you: nothing to do with politics, this is directed at you specifically. As before, you don't need to actually post a reply, but think about it honestly, especially as someone who intends to utilize individual interpersonal conversation as a wholesale replacement for political participation; whether this counts as "biting at you" in your mind I honestly don't know, but if we're going to simply drop everything else posthaste I think this item needs to be briefly laid out first.

While it wasn't my intention, some of the statements of fact I've made in my last few posts struck you as so asinine, condescending and uncalled for that you felt insulted, belittled, and disrespected by them; your reaction to them, and to me on quite a personal level, was, in your own words, palpable fury, for which you dared me to ban you and proudly offer no apologies.

Now, after having very rapidly drawn some very broad conclusions about the kind of person I am based solely on my recent post history in this thread and the forum at large, as a prerequisite for moving the conversation in a different direction, with you unilaterally claiming the last word on the current subject, you are asking me to provide evidence not only that I actually do things other than talk politics on an obscure internet forum, but that I have any capacity whatsoever to do something simply because I enjoy it; i.e. I am required to prove to you, to your liking, here and now, that I am a minimally functional human being before you even consider me worthy of genuine engagement on a topic more agreeable to you than the current one.

My question to you is, how should I feel about being spoken to in such a way, and what manner of reaction should I be entitled to, whether I choose to act upon it or not?

All right then. If you want to hear about something I enjoy outside of posting here and gaming, I'll actually expand upon a tidbit I briefly alluded to awhile ago in this very thread: I enjoy singing. I participated in the chorus throughout high school, as well as onstage musical shows, and up until a few years ago sang with the local chapter of the Barbershop Harmony Society. My "natural" range is more or less baritone, but since I do have some upper range every chorus I've sung with has signed me on as a tenor, since they're always short on those; by most reckonings, including my own, my voice is generally better suited for ballads than uptunes. I'm not a trained musician and can't really read sheet music, but I do have a decent sense of pitch and can learn most songs if I can listen to a clear recording of my part enough times; plenty of room for improvement on the breathing, posture, and facial presentation fronts, though, among plenty of others.

Off to the side, I have no problem stating that I enjoy the Touhou games (even if PoFV is making me pull my hair out at the moment ); as I mentioned in the OP of the thread in Shmups Chat, I do own every mainline title (no additional merchandise though, unless you count the pair of doujin music CDs I'm offloading in my For Sale thread), but have legitimately cleared few of them, so I want to try and see how many I can finish properly if I focus on them for a bit. So there's that.

[BryanM]

Jesus almighty, many of us aren't taking the apocalypse very well.

Here are some more happy thoughts:

Remember how I brought up the likely possibility that Merrick Garland would have joined hands with the rest of the republicans on the supreme court? It's at least a 25% shot, and I'd call that highly optimistic.

Take the assumption that to not face collapse from climate change, we had to act by 2016. That that was a hard cut off date, and we'd call that highly optimistic as well (because realistically, the early 90's was when we had to begin to move.) And there's no shades of grey here; either they took the 99.99% pay cut and saved human civilization, or they chose to kill everyone on the planet. Obama being elected president back then would be as bad an outcome as possible, and was arguably the absolute worst possible outcome. We are all dead where we stand, after all.

So here's the real-world ultimate result of lesser-evilism; no theory, no trolley problems. We're all in the trolley and it's already sailing in the air having gone off the cliff. The liberals helping the fash take control instead of suffering a 5% pay cut these days is just the icing on the cake.

This is in my weekly blog post too, but this is why I don't understand the people who don't want to elect "old" people. At the very worst, they won't have a 90+ year long dynasty like Obama has or Buttigieg would have.

... thinking about it, my misanthropy is probably a big reason the apocalypse doesn't get me down much at all. It affirms my own beliefs: of course these animals would murder themselves in the stupidest, most obvious manner possible.

We were never going to give up cars or jobism. So thorium reactors were probably the only shot we had. : /

[BareKnuckleRoo]

i'd get on your case for obvious transphobia

Have you perhaps come to this conclusion based on faulty reading skills? This is perhaps ironic given that you type giant walls of text without capitalization without realizing how disrespectful and difficult it is for the reader.

you don't fix people's personal overreaction to tepid scolding

What about people's personal overreaction to tepid disagreement on minor points with people who otherwise agree with and support them politically?

the reaction to political powerlessness has to be meta-disengagement and direct empathy

I'm not sure you've paid attention to the last decade of politics or so, but "just be nice" has been tried and has failed miserably. You're suggesting empathy with people who are essentially behaving like literal sociopaths. Also, disengagement is part of what has gotten us to this point thanks to large groups of people who literally refuse to vote, or disengage from doing basic learning about their political choices and thus keep voting for people who have spent decades enacting policies that directly hurt them.

i will "get involved" and "vote for my interests" when that is reciprocated by politicians. not voting en masse creates an outcry that the existing parties aren't reflecting voter interests

It absolutely does not do this, at all. There is zero outcry from the people in power. None. Zilch.

I can tell that you have not had any formal education in political science based on this outright false misconception you have. The people in power absolutely do not give a shit about people not voting en masse. They largely do not see it as a societal failing and care to change it, especially when they directly benefit from it. Exact same thing happens here in Canada. Deliberately rejecting a ballot or spoiling a ballot is not treated as a political statement, and is reacted to with firm apathy by major political parties because they gleefully know that such an act cements their power by those who do regularly vote. Conservatives in particular love it when people don't vote because they know that the current trend is when this happen it's younger, misguided individuals who would've voted against them. As a result, both in Canada and the USA, it's literally their gameplan to disenfranchise voters as much as possible and make liberal voters believe their votes are worthless.

If they actually cared about 100% voter turnout they'd enact compulsory voting like Australia does. The fact that political leaders do not should tell you how little they care about when people don't vote or spoil their ballot.

Plurality elections are terrible, but one of the major ways you can work to change it and improve it to an election system that doesn't suck (score voting or approval voting ftw) is to first make sure everyone is participating and voting in the current system, which also helps raise awareness of the failings of the current system. Durandal's previous post about being able to work towards change from both inside and outside the democratic framework is 100% spot on, regardless of your general dismissal of it.

[BIL]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDEiVR6GSkc

Social media addicts knifing one another in the sack crack and back, News At 11

You know, two decades ago I read about a lady volunteer who went to Haiti, to help out after one of their frequent devastating earthquakes. Long story short, she ended up trapped alone on a rooftop with a Haitian bloke who stomped her face in, then brutally raped her all night while beating on her some more. Womp womp! I try looking her up occasionally, but, well, Haiti Earthquake Rape produces quite the spread.

As I vividly recall, the victim recounted her protests throughout said incident, regaling her rapist with her studies of Huey and Angie and *ARF ARF* X, whose coffin would've hit sufficient RPMs to invent time travel and avert his own death, had he heard this retarded story. She'd read all the liberation greats! PLUS she was a diehard follower of Dworkin and all those other crazy cunts! How could Third World Rapist Man not leave her MILFY white pussy be, out of ~solidarity~ ?

The bit that really stuck with me was that, when all was said and done, and she was back Stateside, she exonerated her rapist of all agency, while ripping into WHITE MURICA for its sins against POC and Wimmenz (this was in the article which brought her to my attention). How dare they put that chap on that roof, where he would leave WHITE WIMMENZ in stitches not with his mirth, but his fists and other implements!

And I thought "Wow, this is a genetically suicidal individual who'd delightedly see herself obliterated from the face of the Earth, because people that vaguely resembled her done some shit hundreds of years ago."

What I'm saying is that when the dumb bitch in the above video gets beaten and/or turned out in an alleyway (in an ally's way even! ), I anticipate much the same response. I hope for it anyway. It snapped LIL BIL the fuck out of his goody-goody kumbayah everyone is awesome daze, I know that much!

"Harumph! (■｀w´■) Are you advocating for the brutal rape of Asian women?!" Yes. Well, no.

(You know there's this pair of lads doing some 500yrs apiece for similar, back home, and they actually went crawling to Mother Blighty and the UN for clemency? It didn't work. They'd be dragged out of the prison, beaten shitless, then set on fire in the street, if it did. A real BUN DEM! I thought WHITE PEEPO were the enemy! But AYKSHUALLY it's BLACK N BROWNS keepin these local rapeos down 3;)

I just think if you're gonna be a retard, you might as well be the best you can be, like Mrs. Haiti Rooftop Lady, who I really should get a name for, because she took an epic rogering to bring us this story. Hope he didn't knock her up, God knows what self-annihilative shite that poor creature's mind would've been formatted with from birth.

[BryanM]

It is correct that children are shaped by their environment and the colonies all have a boot on their necks to this day (ask Burkina Faso how the whole "being free" and feeding yourself instead of accepting debt slavery thing works out. Always someone willing to be a Judas.). It is also correct a dog will devour any meat put in front of them. (I guess dogs are a lot like the pigs that way.) You wouldn't walk around Burgerland without constantly avoiding being under the power of random men for even a second, why would you anywhere else.

Normie 'social media', what is it for besides shitposting comedy, being horny and holy war. Those are the only emotions that trend, sadness just goes into a hole to die. Alone. ;_;

This is making me remember how much having 'other people' around was supposed to revolutionize games, like MMORPGs or whatever. At its best it was a chatroom stapled to a game. At its worst, was a horrible distraction from the cool single player game you were trying to play. People suck.

The whole dream of what an MMO could be wants fake AI people, not real people.

The people in power absolutely do not give a shit about people not voting en masse.

True true. They do get angry when you primary them or come close to it though. Man do they rage and rage when they lose.

Of course, when they say "We're afraid he's going to lose like McGovern!" what they actually mean is "---->We<---- will make him lose like McGovern."

[BIL]

You wouldn't walk around Burgerland without constantly avoiding being under the power of random men for even a second, why would you anywhere else.

Sounds like MALE PRIVILEGE 2 ME Bryan (■｀w´■)



(;｀w´;)

Since deleted. A bit like those two hiker chicks, and that couple out to "disprove the myth of evil," and god knows who else.

This shit is literally making people stupider, I'm certain. I used to think "maybe the stupid was always there," and surely, in a certain quantity, it was and ever will be. Some people, men and women alike, are fated to find themselves drunk and alone on Bad Crimes Street on the corner of You Gon Get Raped BLVD at 2AM, glazed over on twatter while ambling into a crowd of young blokes with concealed faces.

I suppose the difference is (as with Forbes above), the media clamping onto that lucrative (?) Cancel Cock with both hands, so now when someone says something horrendously ill-advised and you say "Wow, bad idea" you've got an entire neural network of soulless hacks bleating "THATS [x]ISM" in the unfortunate twat's ear. Sometimes it's about trivial shite, like capeshit movies ("Wow this choreography blows ass, that red dude woulda stabbed Mary Sue in her friggin aorta" "OMFG NECKBEARD"), other times, people get ISIS'd.

"Bruh, imma do BUTT STUFF PRANKS (Gone SEXUAL ) in MURICAS BADDEST HOODS" "You wanna get shot?" <- RACISM
"Bruh, imma do BUTT STUFF PRANKS (Gone SEXUAL ) in REDNECK FARMIN TOWNS U.S.A." You wanna get shot?" <- DAS RIIIITE

It's making me a bit of a ghoul tbh, I gotta practice what I preach and back off a bit. >_>

"Aight babe imma put this phonebook over my chest and you BUSS ON IT FOR REAL aight?" "Ye FR" *BLAMMO*

[Mischief Maker]

MM, you're at least as confusing to me, if not more confusing because i'm pretty sure BM at least gets a bit real, sometimes.

[...]

(you can participate in the same challenge, if you like. i will carry talking about whatever it is you post and respect your effort with total sincerity and you have my promise)

My apologies. These last few weeks have been the first non-funeral family gathering I've enjoyed since quarantine. I've only been briefly skimming the forums and snatching the occasional low-hanging fruit. I thought you were just talking about psychedelics, I didn't realize you were having a moment. It was not my intention to come across as disrespectful.

[BryanM]

Sounds like MALE PRIVILEGE 2 ME Bryan (■｀w´■)

It is and it totally rocks. The edgy youth incel crowd don't appreciate what a sublime gift total apathy from society is. They always see some lucky person getting more and think the grass is greener in every way.

Always lol at how angry they are at thots building an audience for themselves. Like anyone gets to be in their 20's forever, geez.

Is anime gamer youtuber girl food4dogs getting thirsty simps? Of course not. ... I hope not. Now I'm worried about her DM's...

The Dick Cheney Immortality Serum ain't meant for anyone not named Dick Cheney. Everyone else'll get the crappy stuff that'll make your muscles and brain work a little better and raise the floor on average age of death a bit, but no more than that.

Would be do-gooders having a bad time abroad is an ancient story. The rebellious teens falling for ISIS propaganda of a handsome man holding a puppy, and wanting to experience a mythical culture of "their roots" emigrating and immediately becoming a "wife" were pretty downer stories, yeah.

In the old days leftist organizations used to compete with churches head to head as a community support center. In a society which is cruel as fuck, charging infinity dollars for daycare, charging rent for literally everything including your fuckin' teeth... people can use a free sandwich wherever they can find it.

It's a pity that creates an incentive of for-profit churches to make everything as absolutely miserable as possible, lest people not need them for basic material survival anymore...

[kitten]

My question to you is, how should I feel about being spoken to in such a way, and what manner of reaction should I be entitled to, whether I choose to act upon it or not?

i don't know you and have never believed i do, the 'generalizations' were just 'the information i know,' which is a deeply incomplete picture of any person, but not a great picture. i don't like staying pissed off at people, and it was becoming more and more obvious that alternating between being derisive to emphasize the impact of how insulted i felt (which really is more than i ever have on this forum by no small margin) and explaining at length to try to shape why i was mad wasn't working. i'd still rather you know, but i am tired of congesting the thread and it is complex. if you want me to continue in pm, i'm down, but they're going to be big pm's. i'll tone down the cuntiness, but i'm still mad.

anyway, this wasn't "prove to me you're human," it was a sincere: "i know for sure there are cool things about you and i'm not planning on sticking around for long, i'd rather get to know how you're cool than leave only pissed off."

Barbershop Harmony Society.

now this is genuinely fucking cool that's the kind of character lore i want to know is lurking behind any given forum entity that i'm not privy to. do you wind up actually playing in quartets, and if so, have you ever worn the hat and waxed your mustache? is there any accompanied dance routine or choreography? do you have any sort of particular genre predilection to what you prefer? do you wind up ever doing a little bit here and there for special events or at family gatherings or anything like that? it's a shame that harmony groups have become this "lame" or borderline obscure thing that's frequently derided like it isn't a legitimate variety of meaningful performance.

i'm a bit curious given that this is an increasingly uncommon interest (i think any creative or performance-based pursuit is tough, today - america is dying, cloud) if you have any sort of particular story on how you wound up going this path.

Off to the side, I have no problem stating that I enjoy the Touhou games (even if PoFV is making me pull my hair out at the moment ); as I mentioned in the OP of the thread in Shmups Chat, I do own every mainline title (no additional merchandise though, unless you count the pair of doujin music CDs I'm offloading in my For Sale thread), but have legitimately cleared few of them, so I want to try and see how many I can finish properly if I focus on them for a bit. So there's that.

wtf... no merch... i often consider touhou to be a bit like pokemon in that i am not particularly interested in playing it, but enough people i know have transformed it into a local (as in, my social spaces) enough culture without even caring about the games that i've recently decided to start participating by picking my favs and joining in on which characters all represent us best and shit like that.

i had a frankly distant interest in it because i've never much enjoyed danmaku and didn't "get" why the characters were appealing, but when you catch someone else's enthusiasm, it's easy to take something you didn't like and turn it into something that you do. i maybe graduated from antipathy to ambivalence to curiosity to pleasure. i'm still not super crazy about the character designs, but there's so many of these little weirdos and the traits are so... eclectic but condensed and specific that they feel almost like learning about tarot.

i have a bit of a sociological interest in any sort of popular phenomenon, especially ones for "spergy retards," so i finally got won over. i think that when anything hits this kind of level of 'cringe' cascade to this extent that it sort-of just becomes cool, to me. i'm late as fuck to the party, though... the kind of abstraction of identity that people who get really obsessed go through and the history as a tried-and-true doujin-born, doujin-made miracle make it special. i think that divinatory behavior hasn't really gone anywhere in society, it's just compacted into weirdos way too into "wriggle nightbug," and i think that's "interesting." if you don't have a favorite character, i'm astonished.

My apologies. These last few weeks have been the first non-funeral family gathering I've enjoyed since quarantine. I've only been briefly skimming the forums and snatching the occasional low-hanging fruit. I thought you were just talking about psychedelics, I didn't realize you were having a moment. It was not my intention to come across as disrespectful.

my bad, i read it as a weird snipey diss. i respect the apology and apologize myself for the wrong read. i hope you've been enjoying meeting up with your family (especially after what had to have been a rough couple of years, my sincere condolences for any big loss). it's too often i hear from everyone of every walk of life online that they're never getting along with their folks or siblings or etc. most of my friends are trans, so it's especially bad in that regard, i am an extreme outlier in having forgiven my parents for etc.

... thinking about it, my misanthropy is probably a big reason the apocalypse doesn't get me down much at all. It affirms my own beliefs: of course these animals would murder themselves in the stupidest, most obvious manner possible.

on the bright side, i think this makes it really easy to forgive everyone, too. bryan, you're a political theater enjoyer, while i'm doing a "just chatting it up" post, i gotta ask - you into shit like legend of the galactic heroes, various gundam shit, etc.?

[BulletMagnet]

i'd still rather you know, but i am tired of congesting the thread and it is complex. if you want me to continue in pm, i'm down, but they're going to be big pm's.

Considering that you've endured experiences that I hope I never have to and that I've had enough trouble trying to figure out where your responses to me have come from as it is, I honestly don't know how much I could keep up even if you attempted to explain things to me at length. Off the cuff I'll just restate that it was never, from the very start, my intention to insult or belittle you; I don't know if you believe me when I say it, but for whatever it's worth it's the truth, and I really don't have a heck of a lot more to offer beyond that.

do you wind up actually playing in quartets, and if so, have you ever worn the hat and waxed your mustache? is there any accompanied dance routine or choreography? do you have any sort of particular genre predilection to what you prefer? do you wind up ever doing a little bit here and there for special events or at family gatherings or anything like that?

I was briefly in a quartet, though neither it nor the larger chorus we were a part of ever donned the "traditional" garb; I will note that garishly loud vests are something of a modern costume tradition, though. Choreography tends to be kept fairly simple in my experience, partially because it's tougher to hit notes precisely enough to "ring" them while moving around too much, though a degree of emoting/gesturing/etc. are very much part of the performance; one way I've heard it put was "don't move to the music, let the music move you". I like to think I have a fairly broad taste in terms of genres arranged in the style, from the old chestnuts to the wildly inappropriate, though obviously some individual songs strike my fancy (and suit the four-part setup) better than others. I have assisted the chorus once or twice since leaving when they're short on tenors for a gig, though not a heckuva lot past that point.

it's a shame that harmony groups have become this "lame" or borderline obscure thing that's frequently derided like it isn't a legitimate variety of meaningful performance. [...] i'm a bit curious given that this is an increasingly uncommon interest (i think any creative or performance-based pursuit is tough, today - america is dying, cloud) if you have any sort of particular story on how you wound up going this path.

The "origin story" is nothing terribly interesting I should think, as I mentioned I sang in high school, but by chance some years later a local newsletter (you know the kind; one third local advertising, one third off-color reader-submitted jokes, one-third diatribes about Obama being the antichrist) distributed at the place I worked at the time contained an ad for the local BHS chapter, and a coworker pointed it out to me; having not sung in any "official" capacity for some time before that I figured it'd get me out of the house and gave it a shot, and ended up hanging around for a few years.

As for barbershop singing's jokey status in the public mind, well, it is more than a little quaint by nature, and certainly has a not-completely undeserved place in the American consciousness as obsessed with "the good old days", but for me that anachronistic quality was part of the appeal; since it's so ingrained in the culture everyone knows what a barbershop quartet is and the basic idea of what one sounds like, but very rarely actually gets to hear one, so whenever you sing one of those songs (on-key, at least) people are almost sure to perk up and pay attention. The other big selling point for me was its relative simplicity in terms of setup; as long as four guys (or gals, the BHS also has women's and mixed divisions) know the song they don't need any instruments, microphones or anything else, just a place where folks can hear them, so if a few of you are together you can be appealingly spontaneous with your singing if an opportunity arises.

i often consider touhou to be a bit like pokemon in that i am not particularly interested in playing it, but enough people i know have transformed it into a local (as in, my social spaces) enough culture without even caring about the games

I suppose I'm pretty much the opposite kind of case, since I was first exposed to Touhou via the actual games themselves (albeit not as early as the folks who have played the pre-Windows entries), and have never felt much need to move beyond that in terms of fandom, though I do sometimes admittedly get a chuckle from fan creations that don't take themselves or the series too seriously. I suppose IRL I tend to have similar tendencies in other areas too; unlike most of the population I love raw tomatoes but never liked ketchup, for instance. Guess I'm just odd that way.

if you don't have a favorite character, i'm astonished.

Hm...if you held a gun to my head I'd probably have to say Sakuya, for some reason I've always kind of dug her design (and more recently her "rumored" backstory as well), even though "maid" characters don't usually do much for me; presumably I'm not entirely alone in that, considering she was granted main character status in at least one notable spinoff. It figures, of course, that she's also one of the characters giving me the most grief as an opponent in PoFV.

[BryanM]

on the bright side, i think this makes it really easy to forgive everyone, too. bryan, you're a political theater enjoyer, while i'm doing a "just chatting it up" post, i gotta ask - you into shit like legend of the galactic heroes, various gundam shit, etc.?

I've actually only put in any serious time in animoo and mangos post 2010. Prior to that was mostly just the light stuff everyone was exposed to on TV: Lupin, Fist of the North Star, Wicked City, Ninja Scroll. And then the mainstream battle shonen stuff; Dragon Ball, Bleach, Fairy Tail.

Galactic Heroes scares the shit out of me. The worst thing would be if I actually liked it then I would be obligated to watch most of the 400 episodes, when I really prefer the "4 hours and I'm free" model of most series. Watching the remake or whatever would make me feel like too much of a poser. Gundam I haven't gotten into like others have (I don't have their nostalgia for it); maybe I just haven't tried the right series I don't feel like I've given it a fair shot.

These days I don't spend any of my day time on passively watching stuff. It's a sleep aid to prevent insomnia; as Georg Rockall-Schmidt would call it, "background noise to drown out the panic." So I tend toward stupid cute fluffy shit these days. Something with minimal combat or horrible suffering.

Webnovels have been my main form of passive entertainment the past half decade. Just the shear glut and variety of content dwarfs any other medium, especially the for-profit ones. The absolute worst form of media as a serial is the monthly comic - wait thirty days for five minutes of entertainment, woo-hoo. A highly active webnovel, you can have that hit every single day.

Even that's begun to wear off and I'm ready to move on. The only one I'm still active with is Jackal Among Snakes these days.

Eh, I'm going to try to watch some Planetes soon. I'm sure it'll be as sunny and optimistic as Star Trek or Black Mirror is~

[BIL]

Congratulations to the England ladies' team on 8-0 versus Norway! （＾w´ ）

It's just a shame they're all *ugh* black. (｀w´メ)



Wait that doesn't sound r- Oh fuck. (◎w◎;)

White! I mean it's a shame they're all WHITE! HU-WHIIITE! (;｀w´;) Calm down ffs.

I'm just the bloviating hole who parrots this cancerous IDPOL shite at you, the taxpaying Briton. Much obliged, "mates" (｀w´メ)

I wonder if these grotesquely myopic sorts need literal famine or plague or war in their lives. I mean a proper "holed-up in a burnt-down garage with some soft-as-shite former BBC presenter who can't stop moaning in pain because of his compound-fractured tibias, so you smother him to death and steal his rations hoping not to starve" action.

This shit can't be healthy. Not to mention the red meat it's chucking into the BNP sorts' cage. Guess what they (and to be fair, I and a lot of other moderates) are yukking it up at! That's right, it's the Euro 2020 fiasco where the men's ~Totes Diversical~ penalty team shat the bed! Oh well.

[BryanM]

That's one of the annoying things about social capitalists, they always complain about symptoms of capitalism, but not the underlying material causes of those symptoms.

There's a good case for affluence correlating with opportunities of all kinds. Swimming is probably the most visible one: if black people can perform brain surgery, I'm pretty sure a few of them would be able to master this kicking-off-of-walls sport to some degree. But like 64% don't even know how to swim, and those who do usually aren't practicing on a daily basis. They can only get good at what their public schools can provide: track, football, basketball. Baseball would probably be more popular, if it was any fun and anyone would want to play it with u. Your foosball skills would probably be dramatically improved if you had a soccer mom Karen putting your ass on a team when you're like four years old.

The pentathlon is probably the ultimate rich asshole sport there is. Skeet shooting and fencing are bad enough, but you do have a horse, right, bro? Right? You're not so poverty as to not even be able to step through the door, right?

Anyway, the ridiculously high percentage of blonde people in that picture is what really raises a question. Hopefully the answer is "they just dyed their hair, you asshole" and not a result of mating preferences of Britannia's lower capitalist class/upper working class.

[kitten]

but for whatever it's worth it's the truth

eh, just... come on friendly, first, the next time. that's where benefit of the doubt would have been for me and critically wasn't. unlikely to be with me, but i mean, in any instance where you see someone talking that much about how hard their life's been, they're probably following opinions about where their mind is made up with more deliberation and experience than it looks like (possibly ill-informed, which i'll contest i wasn't, in my case, but rarely ever inexperienced and without reason). i think i've chilled enough to get across my points better.

if you had any idea how many dead/suicidal (and actively threatening/on watch for attempting)/homeless/drug-addicted/domestically abused/sexually violated/etc. people are in my life or right next to other people in my life and had seen what addiction to political theory and being "correct" did to each and every one of those people by nature of their body bringing discourse straight to the door, you'd probably understand the tier of vitriol i pumped out.

the theory hole likes to kill those who go too deep because they wind up at odds with their peers. and it tends to kill the masses, who go too shallow, because no populace this logistically fucked is going to think deeply enough to understand how to advocate for or even recognize their own needs as dictated to them by distant supervillains who don't understand anyone's needs but their own. i really feel like the only logical conclusion is to take what's within our reach - which is mostly just in the most local of senses - actually into our hands and resist/dismantle authority. on a super broad sense if everyone connected to their neighbor and did this, this would mean getting rid of the avengers and overwatch and mcdonald's and nobody wants that, though. can't undo what car culture has done to... fucking everything, either. roads shouldn't exist as they do in the modern day in america. cities are parking lots.

the only solution i can offer is personal, which i think is the only solution that can really be offered.



a friend of mine is a walter benjamin fan, she introduced this bit to me a while back. within the same week, i was talking to another, isolated friend who referred to it. the painting, in question, is pretty fun and i tend to think of it pretty often when i think of culture, when i think of the world and where it is headed. it's on my mind, in particular, when it comes to "cancel culture," or whatever we want to call it. probably there are places where 'getting involved politically' matters, but my argument is that it feeds our personal discontent and "the monster" (america) too much to treat any other way than you would a bully with a gun. at least i can say that certainly, for myself. power is deeply idiosyncratic and the authority that people subjected to it turn to is rarely ever for their own benefit, especially in a system this corrupt. likewise, their ability to become educated is rarely ever to their own benefit, especially in a culture this corrupt.

not to say the conclusion should be "do nothing," but we're kind of making the most of doom. i cling tight to the people i know and help them in ways i can, but much of that is teaching people to disengage from the self-harm that is believing their ceaseless devotion to burning themselves up will do anything. a lot of my friends are former activists and have gotten sprayed, blasted with rubber bullets, etc.. what it does is make people bitter or manipulated into team a or b's rhetoric and adopted into more fuel for the unending subjugation of all of us. almost all application gets co-opted and the only events that cause "real change to happen" are really egregious deaths or mass death.

was in wal-mart, yesterday, check this shit out:


(mostly vanilla... some brownie.... and a little cherry........ what the fuck is this flavor combination saying about culture)

cancel culture is the manifestation of our powerless to believe the praxis by which we dismantle the broader culture at large that is killing us all is defeating targets offered to as sacrificial lambs. what it winds up being is the rich and powerful being more and more insulated from harm as outrage that should be violent riots and political assassinations (or, sure, people voting in actual candidates for actual change, but that's such a farshot that it just winds up being incentive to burn out and participate in this drudgery because we're all praying very hard we can do anything at all) as a reaction to corruption becomes social cannibalizations of peers. our anger gets taken out on those around us or within reach and agents of "real power(money)" become further obfuscated from any form of scrutiny. though the minions doing creative work for them don't, so we can keep killing writers and artists until corporations know the exact components of a proper shill to assemble on the line.

my "talk to conservatives" bit is really just that making friends is going to be more useful for any given person. it's just more useful to have friends, this isn't about fixing society, at this point. that does mean accepting people with more power than you, but it also means accepting those with less and accepting that 'power' is so out of the people's hands that they're probably suffering more than you'd know without talking to them and giving a little free therapy. a lot of 'progressives' are privileged, insular people who have no idea how to talk to anyone outside of their "born into a wealthy family in a blue state" bubble and don't even know the marginalized people they believe they're advocating for, anyway.

i find it harder to get liberals to disengage and believe they're making the monster bigger because their flavor of popular politics is the one that is "more correct." but we're all wrong and have to let go our addiction to being right. maybe when we're all friends and neighbors after society collapses we'll have "what's right" in our hands again for a while, but i'd rather cut straight to that chase and just treat society like a wilderness i can't do anything about and start treating everyone like my friend and neighbor now. history is reverting us to animals, already. where are the great artists and philosophers and aesthetes of our time? i guess at the costco, unknown to everyone else because we couldn't think to celebrate them without first thinking of their ability to think or create as a resource making their meat fat and plump for us to consume. how dare they have anything more than any of the rest of us without first placating us?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As for barbershop singing's jokey status in the public mind, well, it is more than a little quaint by nature, and certainly has a not-completely undeserved place in the American consciousness as obsessed with "the good old days", but for me that anachronistic quality was part of the appeal; since it's so ingrained in the culture everyone knows what a barbershop quartet is and the basic idea of what one sounds like, but very rarely actually gets to hear one, so whenever you sing one of those songs (on-key, at least) people are almost sure to perk up and pay attention.

i really and sincerely do think that embracing anachronism and taking back degraded or obscured and now-irrelevant art and expression is a substantial tool of both self (more important) and cultural (not unimportant) liberation. this is the kind of thing i really like to advocate for friends to get into because i think that kind of empowerment engenders a person to more independent development and coalescing of becoming a real "human being." even if the pursuit starts from a kind-of novelty purpose, it's still doing something with your life that enriches yourself and those around you. it's also kind of specifically americana and the kind of americana that feels authentically 'good'. taking something old-timey and giving it a modern spin celebrates heritage without invoking despair when done with real enthusiasm.

really, i will find a way to celebrate almost any form of expression.

Hm...if you held a gun to my head I'd probably have to say Sakuya, for some reason I've always kind of dug her design (and more recently her "rumored" backstory as well), even though "maid" characters don't usually do much for me; presumably I'm not entirely alone in that, considering she was granted main character status in at least one notable spinoff. It figures, of course, that she's also one of the characters giving me the most grief as an opponent in PoFV.

that's the ladybug game i was talking about playing! or, maybe, that was in a post draft that got discarded when i went to sleep one of these last few days <___<. wait, no, i remember, it was over in the scrolling action thread? maybe i gestured to it here once? w/e. that's the only touhou game i've actually completed and i had a pretty good time with it, even if it was super breezy. sakuya is a pretty solid choice for favorite character, at least in my book after playing that game lol. i like to collect tidbits of information from whoever is talking about whatever at any given moment rather doing wiki dives and full plays, myself, kind of like how a schoolground fostered its own culture of favorite pokemon and lore from everyone's uncles working at nintendo.

I've actually only put in any serious time in animoo and mangos post 2010. Prior to that was mostly just the light stuff everyone was exposed to on TV: Lupin, Fist of the North Star, Wicked City, Ninja Scroll. And then the mainstream battle shonen stuff; Dragon Ball, Bleach, Fairy Tail.

bryan.. my god...... you gotta get yourself invested in The Good Shit. there's so fucking much of it. this is a super wack-ass selection of bits and bobs.

Galactic Heroes scares the shit out of me. The worst thing would be if I actually liked it then I would be obligated to watch most of the 400 episodes, when I really prefer the "4 hours and I'm free" model of most series. Watching the remake or whatever would make me feel like too much of a poser.

i've not actually watched it myself, just yet, but i have a lot of friends who are political theater fans who got really seriously invested in it. they're usually the types to not watch a million episodes of something, so i have to imagine it's not actually all that long and probably more just difficult to navigate to what matters or which movies are more worth watching or etc. etc. i could ask around for a guide on how to engage with the series if you're down for throwing yourself. something you've got to do when a series is too sprawling is disengage hardcore from thinking you've got to consume all of it and figure out the good shit.

Gundam I haven't gotten into like others have (I don't have their nostalgia for it); maybe I just haven't tried the right series I don't feel like I've given it a fair shot.

you can really go in just about any fucking direction with gundam and wind up accidentally walking over a pitfall of disinterest. i've tried writing numerous people long and idiosyncratic guides tailored to where they might want to go to begin to get invested in it, and i'm a little too tired out to do that again just at the moment, but...

f91 is a really good start. 2 hour long anime movie that is nearly wholly self-contained in its narrative (it's late in a long continuity but you don't need this frame of reference for this to matter). it's going to punch you with concepts at lightning speed, but it was originally intended to be 50 episodes and got condensed. unlike the recap movies, which are sometimes theatrically interesting and okay in their own right, you're not missing a ton of shit because they had to condense the narrative from the beginning rather than after-the-fact. it's directed by tomino and has character designs by yas and i think was the last time they collaborated. freakishly gorgeous coup-de-grace to the bubble era, it's a visual treat totally in its own right. will give you a big taste for tomino's storytelling without being much committment and if the concepts are flying over your head (i don't think they explain minovsky particles in any gundam series very well but it's a "thing" you "need to know about" to understand why the logistics of communication and combat are as they are) it's at least unforgettably pretty-looking.

turn a gundam is also a pretty refined choice, but it's 50 fucking episodes. what if world masterpiece theater collided with people isolated on a moon for centuries? what if both of these races were uncovering millenia old robots and headed toward disaster if they can't figure out how to love each other and reconcile their differences immediately? it's late tomino and after he stopped being "depressed." it's one of the most lighthearted series despite its continued handling of serious big boy shit.

gundam: the origin (which i talk about more in the anime thread at length on the last couple pages) is the original gundam retold by yas, the character designer for "first gundam" as the japanese often refer to it. he's a director, himself, and has done numerous historical manga. he's a huge fan of political theater, too. this is a 23 volume read, so it's a bit heavy, but it's maybe my favorite gundam thing and one of the most mature and developed.

So I tend toward stupid cute fluffy shit these days. Something with minimal combat or horrible suffering.

you must learn to ENJOY SUFFERING. all thinking must active O__O no passivity in consumption, bryan!

[BIL]

That's one of the annoying things about social capitalists, they always complain about symptoms of capitalism, but not the underlying material causes of those symptoms.

This shameless muppet and her paymasters aren't even thinking that far. It's always about self-flagellation with the BBC and the English media at large. They really thought this was the time to start whining about "diversity," after the Men's Euro 2020 shitshow, and when the Women's team, funnily enough, actually does represent English racial demographics (85% white).

There's a time and place, this wasn't it - but you know something I've noticed about the English middle class: they consistently mistake a lack of inhibition for a complete and utter lack of taste or decorum. Hence this, or graphic bowel obstruction relief surgery over the breakfast news. The "tight-arsed Brit" stereotype died sometime around Cool Britannia in the mid-90s. Now they'll blurt out the most ridiculous shit in the name of "not appearing stuffy." Was a culture shock for a young man coming here from the British West Indies, I tell you.

There's a good case for affluence correlating with opportunities of all kinds. Swimming is probably the most visible one: if black people can perform brain surgery, I'm pretty sure a few of them would be able to master this kicking-off-of-walls sport to some degree. But like 64% don't even know how to swim, and those who do usually aren't practicing on a daily basis. They can only get good at what their public schools can provide: track, football, basketball. Baseball would probably be more popular, if it was any fun and anyone would want to play it with u. Your foosball skills would probably be dramatically improved if you had a soccer mom Karen putting your ass on a team when you're like four years old.

Bryan are you avin a fookin larf m8 Basketball, baseball and American football don't really exist here. We can do you some rugby if you like, at toffier schools. (we actually are fairly good at track, having a healthy West Indies contingent )

But anyway, no, it's not about black kids being denied opportunities. English white working class kids have been getting a raw deal for generations. Their recently-arrived black counterparts are faring little better. You should see our educational attainment stats - white and black WC English pupils in the toilet, African and Chinese immigrant kids with rich parents and hardass standards getting golds across the board.

Support for local youth footie leagues in deprived areas is no exception, it's a perennial sore point. They still tend to get on, the game's famous adaptability to so much as some chalk and a bag of laundry no doubt helping. It's a working class sport over here. "Soccer Moms" aren't a thing either, not remotely. Mums can't get their fookin sprogs away from the footie m8. Chalk n cheese bruv!

No, this is just our new national past-time: Burger Cosplay. Suddenly, our black kids exist in the US's nightmarish drug and gun-infested ghettos, and can't go outside (or even sleep in their beds) for fear of getting shot. In boring old reality, this country does have some riiight fookin shitholes. Thing is, they tend to feature just as many white faces as others. A huge factor is post-industrialisation and outsourcing stealing historic working-class economies right out from underneath generations of young people. Deprivation tends to cut across all racial lines here, moreso than the States.

There was a famous episode of this collective masquerade a few years back - which I've mentioned ITT before, but it remains "unsolved" and I've my eye on it, so whatever - when Sasha Johnson and co decided the UK Plod were running around all guns blazing, Burger-style, instead of ineffectually wagging their fingers at Mean Tweets and occasionally locking up the posters of.

This gained some traction, it being the Summer Of Love, until Sasha got her head blown off by a bunch of gangbangers at an early-morning do. Her mother's wail of disbelief at the refusal of dozens of eyewitnesses to say anything was surprising to some, but having unfortunately grown up cheek-by-jowl with this nihilistic horse shit, it didn't really faze me. Nobody talks to the police in "the ghetto," and sadly, they've imported it to poison their children, too. RIP that particular cosplay.

So coming full-circle, denigrating their hard-working athletes is about all they're willing to reach for, at the moment. It's a really cancerous thing, the BBC, and these poor cunts are forced to pay for it if they so much as want to watch TV or stream video. I only pay the fee because my granny likes Maury and Songs of Praise, even then I feel like I'm selling my soul. Oh well.

Here is some utter horse shit straining to confect a BBC-friendly narrative.

Anyway, the ridiculously high percentage of blonde people in that picture is what really raises a question. Hopefully the answer is "they just dyed their hair, you asshole" and not a result of mating preferences of Britannia's lower capitalist class/upper working class.

Blonde hair is flatly unremarkable in England, it's a famously fair-skinned populace. There are historical reasons for this, a rather unfortunate one is (as you're probably aware) lots of Viking rape. You tend to see more of the dark features the Romans noted of native Britons in the Welsh.

[BryanM]

bryan.. my god...... you gotta get yourself invested in The Good Shit. there's so fucking much of it. this is a super wack-ass selection of bits and bobs.

That's what passive osmosis got. After actively watching all the things... well...

Things really start to blend together, and only the most extreme stuff in some way tends to stand out. I'd struggle to name ten strong recommendations after seeing well over a hundred animated series. And of those I'd call "family friendly", only Saiki K remains standing.

Even my precious hatred for things has faded. Remembering that Nabari no Ou exists only solicits a tingle in the annoyance section of my brain. 90% of my hatred for Shiki was knowing that there are people out there who liked that turd sandwich.

you must learn to ENJOY SUFFERING. all thinking must active O__O no passivity in consumption, bryan!

Good god, I've been through Higurashi, Future Diary, Gantz, Berserk, Uzumaki, Meguca Madooka and dozens of video game apocalypses and cruel xianxias where the protagonist is an absolute monster that'll murder a billion people if it gave him a +1 resistance to fire damage.

Just.. one day the heroine received her parents' fingers in a box and I was like "can't I just open a window and look outside if I want to see this?" It's when I realized I was an old man.

On occasion I'll go back into that space, but old things are old. Things like plot, conflict, pfft. I see now that they're all distractions.

.... I say that, but I really wish someone would translate that manga with the shark flood apocalypse where the protagonists survive by floating around in a bathtub. There's so many cool looking seinen manga in syndication, and freaking nobody wants to touch the stuff!

Hah... at least Kengo Hanazawa is big enough for people to localize his shit.

Bryan are you avin a fookin larf m8 Basketball, baseball and American football don't really exist here.

Yeah yeah, I understand the preference for cricket/rounders and rugby, for not sucking as much as our bizarro world substitutes, but I know you're pulling my leg on the basketball old man. A hoop mounted atop leg-devouring asphalt out in the open, never facing a bit of maintenance over twenty years...

.... that's how you know my elementary school was the poorest motherfuckers. They couldn't even afford concrete or someone to smooth it out a bit. The road was a safer slip n' slide...

I be seeing these other schools with their fancy concrete all over the place... rich little shits grrrrrrr.

But anyway, no, it's not about black kids being denied opportunities.

No, this is just our new national past-time: Burger Cosplay. Suddenly, our black kids exist in the US's nightmarish drug and gun-infested ghettos, and can't go outside (or even sleep in their beds) for fear of getting shot. In boring old reality, this country does have some riiight fookin shitholes. Thing is, they tend to feature just as many white faces as others.

Yes.... but who is more likely to have the opportunity of going outside and getting to continue to breathe?

Society operates on positive punishment and negative reinforcement. Moving up in society doesn't involve receiving a pile of money until you're responsible for keeping a boot on someone else's neck. (Even winning the lottery serves that purpose: "Hey if he can escape that way, I can too" the pigeon will think.) For most it means being slightly less miserable.

It's a dog eat dog world, and that makes it a little ironic that the killbots will be dog shaped. It's stylistically designed to be that way.

[BIL]

Yes.... but who is more likely to have the opportunity of going outside and getting to continue to breathe?

Here? In England? Leafy suburbia and the landed countryside have it better, no question. Then you have working class, city-dwelling families torn apart by gunfire, like this one:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Rhys_Jones

As much as the BBC ghouls wish it were so, this isn't the US. We don't have pockets of ultra-racialised and genocidally out-of-control murder patrolled by heavily-armed piggus, as a hermetically sealed-away white populace looks on quizzically. It's much more mundane and grey than that, as things tend to be here compared to the bright lights across the pond.

Like that article I linked blames training facilities moving to the suburbs and the countryside for the England women's team not being as unrepresentative as the men's. What it's ignoring is that those training facilities are being placed just as far outside the reach of white girls as it is black ones. Burger peg in a crumpet hole.

We do have a conspicuously wholesale-imported Yardie/Badman subculture that tends to attract black youth and the odd whitey, but poke a little at who's doing the stabbing and running up the Drill league tables in parts of London, and you'll be amazed at how milquetoast these little fuckwits are. The average Kingston Yardie is 98lbs soaking wet and doesn't have much but the shirt on his back and a nine in his hand. Not making excuses, but some of those kids kill to eat. The lot that domed Sasha are, again, pampered cosplayers. It's a cultural, not a material sickness.

And yeah seriously, basketball, American football, they're considered exotic import pursuits here. Funnily enough though, I regularly hear from footie-mad English friends who've moved to the States that they got massively into you guys' baseball/football. I suspect it's a real trip just being away from England, where footie is a kind of expression of proletariat anger. I remember going to ballgames in Florida with my Uncle (mom's side) and my dad, and dad (working class Manc) being absolutely floored that he could buy a beer in his seat. Different culture entirely. My uncle joked it was because everyone was strapped and nobody wanted to get laid out.

[kitten]

Good god, I've been through Higurashi, Future Diary, Gantz, Berserk, Uzumaki, Meguca Madooka and dozens of video game apocalypses and cruel xianxias where the protagonist is an absolute monster that'll murder a billion people if it gave him a +1 resistance to fire damage.

just gonna spoiler non-relevant anime talk. if i can get you on board even one of these things i recommend i will consider this very worthwhile -

Spoiler

when i say 'suffering,' i do mean more... considered and robust depths of human condition examination, not "shock anime," which i'd probably describe as "fun but stupid or silly," or """""seinen,""""" which i'd say is usually is just more violent and sometimes even more shonen. i assume you're talking about the berserk anime and not the manga, the manga seems monumentally great, but mostly just because of the artist's obscenely accomplished pen and concepts (which i would probably say of jojo's, which i like but would only call 'smart' more in artist ingenuity than carrying a very meaningful overarching narrative). i'm a fan of the higurashi anime, but i'd say from what i know of the game (which i haven't played but have a lot of intention to - it's long as hell) that it seems to deliberately exaggerate a lot of the silliness. i think the true spirit of the higurashi anime is when in the later episodes they have that little omake with rika and hanyu instead of a proper episode preview and they do things like talk about how there's a fan ship between oishi and keiichi. i think it's sincere, but it's sincere about a lot of low-hanging nonsense.

i actually really like madoka, but it is flagrantly fucking stupid and terribly written. the movie kind of begins to formulate a little bit of a point, but it's like extraordinarily edgy and jarringly less earned or understood utena. i'm mostly in it for the flair (and the budget this flair got), the quality character designs (i really love charlotte/bebe/momoe and kyubey and have a bunch of their toys), and i guess the general beat of ridiculous suffering, which i usually enjoy. the middle sags hard and the idea there needed to be an episode where kyubey talks for more an esoteric sentence or two, much less spends half of the episode trying to exposit "the plot" is really deeply boring and embarrassing. it's following in evangelion's footsteps, but the bad parts of eva and not the excellent parts, particularly the needless esotericism and breadcrumb trail of Lore trying to cover holes in the writing ability or hook viewers. eva left a really bad legacy despite still being pretty great.

i'd consider these things what i would call light consumption (even junji ito, who, mind you, is good), ableit for those with a slightly more iron stomach for nasty stuff. there's still very little thought or processing required, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but they're hardly great. when i talk about the good shit or even talking about enjoying suffering, i'm talking about shit from properly accomplished auteurs with heavily identifiable agendas and motifs. mamoru oshii (and his live action), chiaki konaka, bonsoir ikuhara, hideakki anno (anno's journey is... really interesting. guy's herculean love for otaku culture born from being one becomes despising it and then loving it again with really complex and deeply earned compassion. he got there by sheer accomplishment and dedication, though he had to get groomed by some greats to get a bit smarter. his live action is all great, too), probably yuasa, though he's got some serious misses. or when it comes to manga, people like osamu tezuka, yasuhiro yoshikazu, taiyo matsumoto, etc. there's excellent film to watch by some of these peoples' big influences, too, i really strongly suggest obayo kobayashi's oeuvre (who oshii very obviously likes and is one of japan's most excellent filmmakers sadly almost exclusively known over here for 'house') and shuji terayama, particularly 'pastoral.'

brute forcing through a lot of series as casual entertainment i think prohibits finer enjoyment, but the trade-off is serious attention and investment over feel-good-brain-turn-off. which i do miss, once in a while, but eventually hit a point where i just couldn't watch garbage, anymore. i'll recommend one thing for each and try to keep them short stuff -

mamoru oshii - patlabor 2 (the movie)
chiaki konaka - texhnolyze [22 eps]
bonsoir (formerly kunihiko) ikuhara - sarazanmai [11 eps]
masaaki yuasa - eizouken [12 eps] (lightest consumption of all of these)
yasuhiro yoshikazu - jesus [2 volumes]
taiyo matsumoto - cats of the louvre [~2 volumes] (the english single omnibus is a cheap-but-nice hardcover)
osamu tezuka - ayako for "direly serious anti-miracle" (~3 volumes, the pacing is a little grueling but it pays off, do not for the love of god read the published english version which has things like "nii-nii" translated as "bro bro" and characters speaking in barbarically offensive antiquated southern-american tongue for kansai dialect [fucking literally using 'masta']) and apollo's song (~2 volumes) for "still serious, but with all the lovely tezuka trappings and brisk pacing"

since you like star trek, this goes outside of the boundaries of 'anime' but is heavily within a considerable amount of showa era manga & anime's key influences, really and seriously consider getting into ultraman. it's pretty light viewing and much more like classic trek than you might imagine. you will eventually learn to love a ridiculous man wrestling in a suit and probably immediately like the sci-fi and humanism. tsuburaya was a pretty genius mind. you could probably knock out trying both yuasa (who loves adaptation and whose original stuff is a little weak) and matsumoto at once with 'ping pong,' which is as good as people say it is.

- -

to tragically wrap this back around to "cancel culture," my boy chiaki konaka got cancelled some months back. why? for saying.... "cancel culture" in a script he gave for some of the old digimon: tamers (highly recommended, surprisingly easy viewing while still having a shocking amount of chiaki konaka's fascinations, but a bit long) VA's to read during a performance hopeful for a tamers revival. it was tongue-in-cheek, but he rattled a hornet's nest and people went back to look at his blog and found out he'd been watching some conspiracy theory videos from some anti-semite talking covid trutherism and wound up leaving twitter for a while over the scrutiny from western fans. the thing is, if you have EVER understood ANY influence on his work, he's been obsessed with conspiracy theories for fucking forever and it is a serious fixture of his writing. he's going to watch a bad source, here and there, but The Goddamn SJW's immediately declared him a covid truther. he just announced skepticism, mostly at how governments have handled it, which has been objectively filled with both false and misdirecting information [ftr in case this is somehow a red flag, i'm fully vaxxed & boosted and mask up even now]). completely normal shit for his wheelhouse and something especially not strange for a foreigner curious about information to be doing as it doesn't carry the connotations of absolute radicalization and """brainwashing""" we see happen to facebook dads.


(as with each of these fucking things, people whose expressive identities had previously substantively been of these creators suddenly began disowning them. what they'd have said at points in their life was among the most meaningful and inspiring things, to them, becomes just another source of pain in their lives and they become less and less imaginative and accepting. they become "old" and "in the way")

while we're on recommending him, serial experiments lain and texhnolyze both use yoshitoshi abe as character designer, who is a mangaka who isn't quite as good as some of these other names at his stories, but who penned haibane renmei, which got a great adaptation that i very highly recommend. another short one, iirc like 13 eps.

what has maybe driven me more totally insane about 'cancel culture' than anything is that i love recommending people things - often people i don't know at all, like i'm some sort of entertainment pastor. usually i try to think of at least one thing i can recommend them from what they tell me about their taste, or i just rattle off a lot of what i consider the best-of-the-best. this now comes loaded with a fucking minefield in which mentioning a lot of the things i like (from creators to themes) comes with a sudden rebuking of artists and insinuations about my personhood, and i either have to do the tedious labor of talking about how bad it is to react to media this way and how much it deprives one of the finer things or just quiet up and change the subject. i am always hyped up to get people on the insane enthusiasm train that i'm on, and it feels like more than any other time in my life, people are more willing to just dismiss things and fall into this apathetic malaise that contributes heavily to their perpetually dour lives.

with a lot of "my people," it's to the point i can't even recommend action games without them talking about how they're ableist or whatever. it's banana pants. corporate agenda loves it, because they can come out looking like they're doing the right thing by making those who stir the dreams of the people & their cognitive beauty and their careers into an absolute trash hell. they just handpick incompetent shills who tick focus group checkboxes to make sure they're still making bank. we've got more colored/queer/neurodivergent creators than ever but the vast majority of them allowed into the public arena are those willing to sell out creative vision and integrity so that their 'identity' (they're most frequently privileged kids from wealthy american families - what "identity?") can occupy the precious media appreciation space they've so craved all their lives. this is also why a lot of "the chuds" get upset that all that shit is garbage, because it fucking is. why, oh why, did we ever accept steven universe?


("tears were shed" when WotC [following being called out for racism] handed management of an overpriced PR product to an eager moron. this was a $40 luxury product for like 5 pieces of cheap, foil cardboard using card stock that curls up so badly that they're considered marked cards in a tournament and can't be used. there was no "game design," here, btw, these were all reprints with new artwork)

there's a lot of resilience to this in japan because of the way their culture operates and their respect for creativity, but over here? jesus christ, we are fucked. a lot of excellent european cinema is dead, too, france sure as fuck isn't what it was in the 60's and 70's (though they also have a thriving manga appreciation culture lol). we already killed off most major thinkers' survivability in the 80's and 90's as a pretty global movement, the last few decades have been learning how to quash even those working allegory into childrens' media and spread that to the rest of the world.

death of appreciation of creativity is the death of culture, is the death of selfhood. it's, scientifically speaking, why the human mind slows down as we age, why we're learning things like how it's good for veterans to play with lego toys because it unravels their ptsd and keeps their minds active, stops them succumbing to daily horror and decay, stirs the ineffable core of their wille zur macht. if we don't challenge ourselves and appreciate what challenges us, it's what erodes our very will to live and for the human mind to find reason to keep itself going. that comes from something as simple as assembling building block toys to brilliant filmmaking like eros + massacre.


(this isn't a small or localized thing, it's indicative of greater breakthroughs in psychology realizing the importance of really engaging one's mind. very likely that that many of these people would have likely never served, to begin with, if they had been people who engaged with more creative thinking prior to enlisting. these two things [military service and cultivating ignorance and incuriosity] are extremely deeply comorbid)

it's why i'm always helplessly flipping the fuck out in this thread lol. we couldn't stop political agency from killing the world, but we can stop it from killing our hearts and minds and souls. a person trapped in even the most unimaginably dire of circumstances still has the capacity to determine value and imagine something better for themselves, to find that impetus within themselves for more. creative agency should be a prime political concern, but we're seeing "progressivism" (especially in america, but the attitude is becoming more globally acceptable) become more and more concerned with weeding out any problematic elements and becoming its own variety of puritanical farming of the human spirit for complacency. no collective can determine individual needs and meaning, no authority but our own can dictate our becoming.

i really deeply want everyone to be pursuing the best for themselves, not just 'having fun' but having 'the most fun'. my recommendation imperative isn't to create a clinically engineered list of "the best," but to try and determine when i find people speaking their beautiful truths and reaching fruition of craft and self in their creative work for myself and share that with others. everyone of course comes to different conclusions on these things, but i always want enthusiasm to meet enthusiasm. i ultimately want to be denied and work harder, find more and more. i think, probably, anyone can do anything to come to this variety of philosophy, but i initially found mine deep in the "gaming" pits and discovering how good it felt to play more and more, become better and better, and how loss and denial added meaning to accomplishment. appreciation of anything at all (far from just media) requires effort and refinement and hands-on commitment, action games were just my brute force into that.

probably i stopped posting because i realized i can only truly successfully do this for a few people (i am the firecracker, the organizer, the preacher, the motivator between my close friends) and go into overdrive when i consider any sort of responsibility to a broader community to properly represent what's great about my interests and rouse the reticent, depressed, and apathetic into their own pursuits. i always feel the cost of not caring, of 'just passing time' or filling in the hours is always higher than the cost of daring to care more about everything you're doing. people don't have a basic income of ability to love, they have to generate that income and participate in its economy, which requires "work". i have actually been more stimulated than ever in my absence - but this has also meant in addition to letting any broader engagement with people be released, i try experiencing more and more things that i've neglected in all my gaming years and let gaming (and "posting") occupy a lot less of my time. my mind is really and truly popping off as much as my hyper-energetic posts on here are basically 24/7.

[BryanM]

when i say 'suffering,' i do mean more... considered and robust depths of human condition examination

I get what you're getting at, but, being something almost human myself, it's never been something I've felt I've been lacking in life. "Do I need someone to tell me water is wet? Do I need to melt my hand in a fire?" Ressentiment/Time of Eve/Watamote is about as close to that as I can bring myself to find pleasant to engage in. The darker "more real" parts of Mother of Learning/Worth The Candle have done plenty well enough to make me uncomfortable for multiple days.

Many of us here know isolation too damn well; a decently sized book is 60,000 words long. Over the years, plenty of us have typed out the equivalent of over a dozen of the things here.

The misalignment of what we were told by society versus the reality... Literally being shaped and groomed by others for their own personal benefit.

The horror of living in bodies literally programmed to break down and die because evolution thought that was a cool and beneficial thing for us to do. Or maybe the evil god running our computer simulation just thought it was hilarious, who the hell knows.

The brutal horror of living under hierarchies, which is functionally identical to over the top grimdark trash. (If you saw a book include an Epstein character in it back in like the 90's, you'd possibly roll your eyes and think 'yeah right, that's a little much, ain't it? Literally everyone in a position of power was using this guy's rape dungeon? And it was all out in the open and nobody cared? C'mon Mr.Author, try a little you sick hack.' And you would call such trash 'unconsidered' or 'shallow'? tsk.)

The rationalist fiction subgenre always comes around to the same theme: no individual is an island. If you want to do big, great things, you need to solve the alignment problem. It's a bit interesting to see nerds come full circle to our roots: "if you want to do something that 'matters', you need to form or join a tribe."

In real life, it's far easier to pick easy mode and join the boot tribe. Online, fighting a holy war by finding someone you hate and telling them everything about them is shit is.. well it's actually way older than the internet.

[kitten]

'yeah right, that's a little much, ain't it? Literally everyone in a position of power was using this guy's rape dungeon? And it was all out in the open and nobody cared? C'mon Mr.Author, try a little you sick hack.' And you would call such trash 'unconsidered' or 'shallow'? tsk.)

ah, you know, i have a really good corollary to this one - i always used to think that lex luthor getting elected president was one of the silliest things i could imagine lol.

i'd call the hypothetical fiction depicting this unconsidered and shallow if i felt it was such. there's an endless number of ways to write it. generally, i use those words when i detect inauthenticity or someone settling for less. i don't think i consider any subject matter, theme, or person abjectly unworthy of a good story, but i do consider "better" and "worse" to be things people can definitely be doing.

Online, fighting a holy war by finding someone you hate and telling them everything about them is shit is.. well it's actually way older than the internet.

is the lesson here that i'm... insensitive in disregarding the validity or necessity of your... i guess... "coping with reality?"

sincere apologies if i am misreading this, but i absolutely definitely do not hate you and my primary goal is to suggest more of whatever would make you happy - i was left with little to discern your taste or preferences and went broad. you self-deprecate regarding your own taste and viewing habits and seem very unhappy. if i'm somehow making that worse, i can leave you alone, just tell me. it's by your standards, alone, you determine what matters and i am by no means an arbiter or anything more than an extremely sloppy interpreter of that.

it's just that if i see someone in the cynicism doldrums, my first instinct - from both my own life experience and my experiences both successfully and unsuccessfully helping others out of it - is to identify what they like and encourage them to love it again, or recommend them new things to love. saying you've watched a hundred things and hardly enjoyed them, that's like, very scary for me to hear, makes me worry. the only thing i'd like to push you to be is happy, which i will never believe is outside of anyone's reach because it would mean not believing in their ability.

(this is maybe worth clarifying if there's been a misinterpretation - i'm speaking to you in the spoilered part of the post, but speaking largely "in general/to anyone" in the rest of it)

[BIL]

Wow I must've been pissed (that's Crumpet for "drunk") the other night, I totally forgot Rhys Jones got his little white wig split on the way home from (dun dun dunnn!) footie practice. His soccer mom found him dead in the pub carpark where some cosplaying cornball did the ghost gun side-cocked spray n' pray at his "Opps" across the street. A dead man walking in any decent society. I hear he's out in 2030, when I'm sure the crown will dip into taxpayers' pockets for a brand new identity.

So across the pond, a Subway sandwich artist got shot dead a while back in Atlanta GA, Burgerland, over too much mayo. The gunman technically left the store, turned around, and fired into the premises. IIRC another worker was struck, her son being in the store at the time. I'm sure he could've killed all three just as easily, these impulsive sorts not being known for their marksmanship.

Well anyway, a lot of people went "Wow! Over too much mayo?!" And not to patronise but I thought "Yeah, and?" You wouldn't believe the things people murder each other over in Badman subculture. Life is cheap. "Respect" is sacrosanct. Was once getting my car detailed by a chap who'd escaped Kingston, who remarked at the marvelous ease of country life, meaning he didn't have to work while looking over his shoulder for disgruntled customers ready to kick the door in and mow down him and his entire staff for missing a spot.

That's So Ghetto™!

So I was delighted to see Philly, a place even hardened Yardies speak of with unease, and which recently marked its most fatal month since records began, is taking a firm stance against a major scourge of the inner city via one B'Ivory Lamarr!

Sesame Place Is Cancelled



This has gone beyond black comedy. It's hit some uncanny spectral register normally imperceptible by the human brain. This dude is talking about "protecting the children" while toddlers are eating flying lead in their baby seats. It's something I would expect only a virulent slavering racist to make up. It's certainly a situation I would expect only one of those to condone.

The crickets are deafening. Oh wow, "moon cricket," that's racist. This is kinda fun, I see now. Imagine getting paid to see racism everywhere.

Bryan this is why I say Crumpetfordshire isn't like Burgerland. If a baby got her brains blown out in her stroller, this nation would slam to a halt in horror. For you guys it's not even Tuesday, it's everyday. Different worlds entirely, even if they share certain common maladies that will, without fail, fuck things up for everyone but those positioned to benefit, like the dogbite ambulance chasing gaping cunt bloviating in the video above.

Nowhere in the Western first world is like Burgerland, mercifully. Though admittedly, the most proximal regularly are hit by the aerosolised fecal matter of each Big Value Flush.

---

Hey, speaking of virulent slavering racists, Gazi "Black Hitler" Kodzo got arrested after taking hostages. Hm. Sounds like he got a bit real there, so much for the flaming homo funnyman. 3; I liked him, in a bad knockoff Chris Tucker way.