never had a thought and not about to start now

IF NOT FOR EAT WHY CAKE?

IF NOT FOR MOUTH WHY HONEYCOMB?

IF NOT FOOD WHY LOOK LIKE FORBIDDEN SNACK?

Big Men / Tiny Men ?

No bitches

i deleted my blog and tumblr immediately asked me if i want to sign up again

and here you are

I’ve been listening to the people in the apartment below me have arguments for two years now and I still can’t figure out what language they’re speaking. The best I can narrow it down is like if Portuguese and Hebrew had a baby. Is that a common pidgin combination

I just listened to a clip of this and jesus christ you fucking got it. there are like 3500 people in the whole united states who speak this and two of them are in a very fraught marriage four feet below me

Been a really long time since I've watched Daredevil but I do remember coming away from it feeling like it presented a pretty compelling internally-consistent moral justification for the vigilante thing. You're not planet-crackingly powerful, it's just that you can hear, in detail, every awful thing your neighbors are doing to each other, every night that they're doing it. You can't not know and you can't pretend not to know and when the kid tells you the next day that he just fell down the stairs you can't fall back on the provided ambiguity to absolve yourself of your responsibility to act. Semi-relatedly, you're really really good at martial arts. Start the clock

Federal workers are going off.

In my first ever article for a print magazine, I'm analyzing Elon Musk's DOGE from the perspective of contractor capture: the notion that for-profit contractors like Musk desire not only money from the government, but also control over government itself.

You can read the full piece below, or pick up the April 2025 edition of The American Prospect at a local bookstore once it's available!

my friend's shiba inu is extremely good at puzzle toys and deeply obsessed with them and today she's been consumed by madness in one room she doesn't want to leave and we finally figured out it's because i sucked up some loose kibble in the little handheld vacuum, thus creating an unsolvable puzzle toy

i think when it comes to knowledge gaps (especially on tumblr) its easy to get insecure about not knowing everything. but the real secret is that you can get away with not knowing everything if you just dont insert yourself into conversations you dont understand with blind confidence. the internet also gives you the privilege of 1) googling/wikipediaing shit before you say it, and 2) not volunteering how little you know. you dont actually have to enter the conversation just to say how little you know. part of the stereotype of dipshit stupid american on here is that americans will say full chestedly that they dont know which continent tchad is in and then go out of their way to justify it with their lack of education. when no one asked them to say either thing. and even if someone did ask, you are never under any obligation to actually answer.

that post that's like "it would be soooo easy to make money if i wasn't so principled" is not even true. the grifter market is notoriously saturated. remember when communismkills got her heat shut off.

scam texts aren't even trying any more. i have to pay my taxes? at latina fiesta dot co???

I take immense schadenfreude in Elon Musk spending $25 million to try to influence an election in Wisconsin only for the candidate he was backing to lose by a larger margin than was predicted before Musk got into the race. Like how tf do you dump that much money into a state supreme court election and get not only nothing out of it but LESS than nothing. That's a truly impressive level of failure. I'm watching Elon become the most hated man in America like the Sickos yes hahaha yes comic

"In Bangladesh, vaccinators chased down children hiding in trees and vaccinated them against their will and without their parents’ consent. Many other vaccinators in Bangladesh favored trains, because people couldn’t run away.

In Ethopia and Somalia, teams sat at watering holes and coercively vaccinated any nomads that came by."

I agree with Ozy here that the violation of bodily autonomy makes this much more awkward a victory. But as justified violations of deontology go "We need everyone to do this or it will result in millions more deaths" is a near perfect example

not to be a killjoy but it's still crazy to me that it's considered mean to be like "maybe you should read / play / watch the source material before creating fanworks and diving into the fandom" bc every time i see somebody going "i havent played disco elysium or know anything about it tbh but uwu here's harry and kim kissing" idk maybe you should engage with it. maybe you should play the anti-capitalist surrealist game where you investigate the murder of a mercenary who led the gang rape of a foreign girl and process that for a bit? and then you can do cutesy mlm or whatever idc. but like at the absolute bare minimum you should understand what the source material involves otherwise we get the phenomenon of people joining a dragon age server and wanting content warnings for like, mage racism. like it's fine to ship and transform the genre into whatever but if you arent comfortable with discussions of the actual source content itself then maybe the fandom isnt for you and a different one is. peace and love.

actual peace and love would involve letting anyone who wants to do things do them, without judgment.

I don't think there is anything unreasonable about the idea that if someone isn't comfortable with actual discussions of the source material they should probably not insert themselves into the fandom. And I struggle to see how this has anything to do with ableism as per your tags.

Well, when you demand a certain amount of effort to be input before you consider someone's creative work valid, that's ableist.

The issue at hand isn't one of the validity of transformative works (and I agree with you there that art doesn't derive meaning or validity from the amount of "effort" poured into it) but of fandom social dynamics and the very simple fact that people involved in a fandom will find people who have not engaged with the source material yet insist on inserting themselves into the fandom annoying. This user articulated it well imo and I'm tired right now:

Unfortunately it's still gatekeeping and still ableist.

I genuinely think it's neither of those things.

i show up to the Planes Enjoyer Convention to talk about how pretty planes are. to my shock i learn planes fly which is awful because i'm scared of heights.

despite me being very passionate, nobody wants to hear about my novel where i imagine planes as types of burrowing creatures. instead people tell me i don't seem very interested in planes or the Planes Enjoyer Convention. this is very mean and judgemental.

eventually i strike up a conversation with someone and they reveal that planes are sometimes used for wars, and they actually like historical "war planes". my heart sinks.

they seem surprised and suggest that i read up about planes. that's just unacceptable. i call them an ableist gatekeeper and protest as i mime being forcibly escorted out of the convention by the security guards i made up in my head.

Underrated element of where Jiang Cheng is re: wwx after everything is that they always had a sort of dual relationship. Two different relationship premises, superimposed on one another.

There's the one where they grew up together, as close as brothers, beating each other up and complaining and being one another's closest companions, sharing a bedroom as kids and eating at the same family dinner table, actively encouraged by Jiang Fengmian to interact as equals.

And then there's the one where Wei Wuxian was in service to Jiang Cheng's family. Not as a servant--Jiang Fengmian absolutely refused to do that, even if he couldn't adopt him. But as a disciple of Jiang Cheng's father and recipient of his charity, as Jiang Cheng's future right hand and most trusted subordinate.

It's a vertical relationship, intimate in its own way but with very strict expectations about what obligations flow in what directions; they are not identical and reciprocal as between friends and equals.

(It's my opinion that Jiang Fengmian's core deal was a deep-seated discontent with the hierarchies he was at the top of, without access to any way to actually deconstruct them or even coherently articulate his opposition. Wei Changze was his dear friend, and no one thinks that's a good enough reason for him to treat Wei Changze's son like his own, because Wei Changze was also his servant, and you can't make that circle square. That's not a way you're allowed to love.)

Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian were like brothers; Wei Wuxian served Jiang Cheng.

The personal relationship was always the most important one. To them, in their hearts. But it was the other one that was real, that had weight in the world.

And it's important to understand that neither can be held up as more factual than the other, even though they conflict. Both relationships existed, and had power.

So then when Jiang Cheng chose to hate Wei Wuxian and articulate his grudge against him, he chose to do it in the language of fealty. Because as far as he knew, his case there was secure, watertight, and it wouldn't expose him emotionally or politically.

And those are the terms in which he's been condemning him all this time: for abandoning the Sect, for ingratitude, for lack of loyalty.

For fuckups, too, and poor judgment, but some of that now turns out to have been justified and some of it was mostly the fault of enemies behaving badly, or even Jiang Cheng himself allowing himself to be pushed into making unworthy choices.

And it was all for his sake.

The thing, the thing in my opinion, about what Wei Wuxian did, about the core transfer and his silent self-destruction around keeping it secret, is that that is a hideous thing to have done between two people who love each other, as an act of love. Beautiful, but awful. As the man who was like a brother to him, Jiang Cheng has a great deal of standing to object to it.

But as an act of vassalage, it's basically perfect.

If Wei Wuxian were only what he formally was to Jiang Cheng, if he is interpreted through a lens of fealty and obligation, he did exactly what he should have done, and went beyond what duty actually required. And went to his death silently, allowing himself to be judged, taking all the burden on himself rather than let harm come to his lord.

Like, obviously Jiang Cheng was harmed by the part where Jin Zixuan got manslaughtered and Jiang Yanli walked into the line of fire in situations where Wei Wuxian was resorting to violence and probably shouldn't have, but those are one step removed from the core issue. In terms of Wei Wuxian's intentional choices around Jiang Cheng himself, at the times he was feeling betrayed and abandoned Wei Wuxian was in fact being impossibly, poetically loyal, an absolute cliche about it.

But only in terms of the hierarchical form of their relationship.

Which means that even though Jiang Cheng has a lot of reasons to still be mad at Wei Wuxian, his actual complaints that he's centered for thirteen years are basically wiped out by the revelation of Wei Wuxian's sacrifice.

Wei Wuxian was in fact doing the tragic hero loyal vassal thing, which very much includes being misunderstood and slandered by the world. (Chenqing as a name choice absolutely references this expectation, and the idea that Jiang Cheng specifically will never understand that Wei Wuxian was trying to help him first and foremost all along; he is not subtle.)

The debts Jiang Cheng has been spitefully calling in and considering defaulted were already long paid.

So if at this point Jiang Cheng keeps pursuing that same line of rhetorical attack, now that he knows, he'll be putting himself morally in the wrong, and he knows it. But if he pivots to something else, he'll both be signalling the shape of that secret to the entire world and looking like a prize idiot.

Which is already how he feels.

To actually address the remaining grievances between them, which are considerable, would require releasing those safe, open grudges to Wei Wuxian's face and then reclaiming him as a loved one. Which is, one could fairly say, more than anyone could expect.

Which is why Wei Wuxian told him he didn't have to.

Which leaves Jiang Cheng at something of an impasse.

@winepresswrath back at it again with the peer-review-worthy tags

@llycaons said #yes....very astute #except 'resorting to violence when he didn't have to' THEY WERE TRYING TO MURDER HIM.... #cql

okay so first, i didn't say 'didn't have to', i said 'probably shouldn't have.' but as far as 'didn't have to'...wen ning can demonstrably catch arrows, and would be more equipped to do so if that was all he was focusing on, so running away was an option at least as likely to work out as fighting on the spot, especially since the field had been deliberately engineered to put them at a disadvantage.

wei wuxian could have hauled ass out of that killbox, retrenched somewhere there were still corpses to work with and he wasn't such an easy target, and taken on the people involved in the ambush as and if they caught up.

but he wasn't going to do that, because if he let himself be repulsed he might not get to see jyl and jin ling, and because he was proud and stubborn and disinclined to retreat. and jin zixun had broken his gift, and generally was an awful person who deserved to die, and he was angry.

so he did the wartime thing and tried to kill them all faster than they could kill him, with no tool for the purpose but wen ning. understandable!

but, responding with violence made the situation worse. it accomplished nothing good and several things bad. and while he had been wronged, and was entitled to take offense and push back, he was doing so out of hurt and anger, not because it was the best idea under the circumstances. not even because he was afraid.

him lashing out there was him falling into the secondary trap inside the obvious trap.

and then at nightless city he didn't need to go there; he definitely didn't need to confront everyone. i don't blame him for doing so, the provocation was in both cases extreme, but the outcome was BAD. it was a bad choice. he should not have done that, in the same way jin guangyao should not have stabbed that guy nie mingjue caught him murdering, even if he deserved it.

just because something is understandable and justifiable doesn't mean it's morally correct, let alone a good idea at all. you don't have to be 'in the wrong' to make a really bad choice.

you may note that after coming back from the dead, wei wuxian avoids getting into fights whenever possible. i don't think this is because he's afraid of losing or of dying. he's afraid of escalating violence, and getting results you can't take back.