30, dude, mixture of articles, takes, and something that I enjoy; I try to focus on psychology and economics. SocDem, anti-authoritarian, continually frustrated.
There’s a psychological effect where being presented with information, even in the context of “this is wrong and inaccurate” actually reinforces your belief in that information if you walk into the exchange believing that thing in almost all cases.
So if you’re sending me wildly inaccurate pro-life or right-wing talking points that have absolutely 0 basis in reality outside of your own warped perspective, I’m just not going to respond. Sorry to burst your bubble, but your anon, and your opinion, are in the trash where they belong.
i can't stop thinking about this. this kind of shit is not like milsim plane nerds with their own super-expensive desktop cockpit recreations. that kind of hardware makes sense to exist.
this does not. they're playing world of tanks which is like the "call of duty" of tank games (casual, players only slightly bad-smelling). it also doesn't have support for tank peripherals. no game does. no trainers do afaik. which means that (assuming this isn't just a video editing) all of that shit they are fucking with translates into mouse/keyboard inputs that the game understands. that's weird/hard and perplexing, uh, and considering that "tank peripherals" aren't a thing that exist i can only guess they built them theirselves
which is fucking hilarious because why are they so good. why does the fucking cannon breech have a little dry ice smoke effect when the breech opens like they just shot a shell. what. manual turret traverse crank?? did they build a fucking ready rack!! they're even using the correct phraseology which means one of these mofos read a PDF file
a few doors down from me my neighbors have a squirrel bar nailed to the tree in front of the sidewalk, not exactly this but something like this:
it's been there for years and they never "stock" it so it's just sitting there. anyway, i thought it would be cute to make a little squirrel out of sculpey and leave it on one of the stools in the middle of the night. i also made a little sculpey beer bottle with its own label.
it lasted exactly one day and now it is gone. it didn't fall off, i stuck it on with tape. what do you think happened to it? your most fantastical and wrong answers only, please
The recently appointed Department of Defense head Pete Hegseth (formerly Fox News pundit, perpetually soused creepy uncle, and current group chat leaker of classified intel) banned images of the Enola Gay from the Pentagon’s website for the offense of “DEI” language. In keeping with the far right’s stated war on anything vaguely resembling diversity, equity and inclusion, even historical photos are up for cancellation. When a literal weapon of mass destruction is censored for being a bit fruity under the Trump administration’s war against inconvenient truths, what exactly is left untouched?
This is clown show stuff, but the stakes are far from funny. While some might be hesitant to compare the current administration to the very worst history has to offer, we can at least all agree that they are dyed-in-the-wool grammar Nazis. Policing language has been the objective of the MAGA culture war long before Project 2025’s debut—the wave of book bans orchestrated by astroturf movements like Moms for Liberty, and Florida’s 2022 Don’t Say Gay bill have already had a profound effect in the arena of free speech and freedom of expression (despite the far right’s long tradition of doublespeak performative free-speech martyrdom to the contrary). Don’t Say Gay ostensibly targeted K-3 education, but LGBT+ content at all levels of education (and beyond) was either quietly censored or entirely preempted in practice. The results were not just a war on so-called ideology, or words alone—but on reality and essential freedoms.
Now, words as innocuous and important as racism, climate change, hate speech, prejudice, mental health, and inequality are targeted as subversive. Entire concepts are being vanished from government institutions, scrubbed not only from descriptions but from metadata, search indexes, and archival frameworks.
And my knee-jerk response was "no, you should hear my friends talk about their lives--"
And it made me remember something.
Back in high school, my IB class did a lock-in-- where the group of students gets locked into one part of the school overnight on a weekend-- and after junk food and video games lost their appeal, we got to talking.
Only I didn't really know anything about almost any of them. They were all friendly enough, but I kept to myself for the most part, so we didn't have much to talk about once standard small talk ran out.
So I asked one of the other people sitting with me: "what's your story?"
Your life story.
And he told me. Sixteen years or so condensed into maybe a half hour. And it was the most fascinating life I could have imagined: the places he'd been, the things he'd done, the experiences that defined him. It boggled my mind.
When he finished and turned the question around to me, I thought mine sounded really boring in comparison, but he listened open-mouthed to the entire thing. Other kids were gathering around us by now, listening in. And when I finished mine, I turned to another one of them and asked the question to them.
And just like before, my mind was blown. A completely different life, completely different focal points, defining experiences, goals the likes of which were deserving of an anime. And the same happened with the next person we asked, and the next.
By the time each one of us had finished telling their story, it was time to go home for the morning. The video games had been abandoned hours ago. None of us had slept. We were too caught up in each other's lives.
If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.
It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.
It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.
This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.
I made a transparent green version of that old geocities dragon vibe gif I was searching for a while back, and I figured while I was there I might as well export a bunch of other colours in case people would like to use them! The last two are solid white and solid black, in case your theme makes either of them invisible lol
Edit Aug. 13th ‘23: Updating original post with all the existing colours! To see the latest, check out the free stuff page on my Neocities :3
Really shows how pathetic US "journalists" are when every other paragraph is "I will not publish this part because it could theoretically threaten our Blessed and Holy CIA officers and Da Troops." Then ends with "I removed myself from the chat once I knew it was actually real and politely informed the imperialist morons of their mistake." If this guy got the Watergate Tapes, he'd have sent them back with a bow and a gift card.
