Unfortunately; a me.

on the subject of it often being out of character for characters to be having carefully negotiated bdsm sex in smut fics: 90% of metal gear ships are insane toxic yaoi and would definitely be having sex that is neither safe nor sane and only borderline consensual HOWEVER otacon and snavid would be thoroughly negotiating kinks before during and after sex like theyre doing mission briefings on a codec call

Of course you're feeling green, that's the only color the codec does

"I am a hero. I taught the Omelas child to say racial slurs, which means the Omelas child is now evil, and thus deserves to suffer. Thereby transforming an evil society into a just society, which is classic heroism. You can start walking back to Omelas now"

I’m sure IO interactive will deliver on the gameplay front, but seeing James Bond written as a passive aggressive millennial is downright painful.

The fuck is even the point of James Bond anymore? James Bond made sense back in the Cold War during the twilight days of the UK as a global power. What threats to the Crown is he gonna fight now? The evil alt-right head of an internet messaging system that talks about immigrant crime statistics? Are we gonna see him tackling old ladies who post unapproved memes?

the point of Bond is being a badass superspy with cool gadgets, not the political environment in which he does badass superspy shit.

James Bond is shit because it's too cowardly to be topical. The original James Bond was modeled on actual spies, and the over-the-top gadgets were modelled on the actual gadgets used by the CIA and MI6 in their espionage and counterespionage against the Soviet Union. In theory, it was a blown-up version of what was going down in real life. It wasn't edgy, but it did have an edge.

The new James Bond is modeled on the original James Bond. There is no edge in self-reference. It is, like the proverbial shark, smooth as hell. In order for a modern James Bond to actually be cool his adventures would need to be modeled on what actual spies are actually doing in actual wars.

Millennial James Bond shouldn't be getting into fistfights on top of moving trains and shooting people with guns that don't look like guns, but he also shouldn't be a quippy Marvel hero played by Chris Pratt. He should be a savvy young British spy who uses social engineering to infiltrate a data center so he can steal the secret code that controls SPECTRE's fleet of autonomous kamikaze drones.

[EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER]

For folks in the notes very upset that she only has two babies left: These baby possums are of dispersion size - they're big enough to leave mom and fend for themselves. These two are just the ones who haven't moved out yet.

Oh wow I had no idea they were so tiny when they left home! Our possums in Australia don't have as many babies so they're generally 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the mum when they get kicked out.

I would definitely assume a baby opossum was abandoned if I hadn't been told otherwise.

Every year wildlife rehabs are delivered many perfectly healthy baby possums for this exact reason and generally, it means they get a little boost of assured safety, food, and hydration before being released. Imagine, you're newly 18 and starting your adult life - you're just kind of walking around, maybe on your way to community college or something, and a Kindly Cosmic Horror picks you up, carries you to a fancy hotel where you are given several really excellent meals and maybe receive a series of vaccinations, then you are dropped into a resource-rich area approximately nearby where the first Kindly Cosmic Horror picked you up. This is how life is for young Virginia possums every spring.

Everything about this delights me.

There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.

I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It's a trend I've seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

Anyway sorry I've rambled here, not sure how coherent I'm being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.

I was thinking about this over the weekend, where you literally have a nigh unlimited amount of options to explore the world but you settle for the unnuanced metaphor that's as subtle as a sledgehammer and in two to five years will be outmoded.

The reason why DS9 works so well is that it's a series that says war is hell, it's complicated and at the end of the day even the "good guys" eg the Federation is willing to commit outright genocide to bring the war to an end.

Tolkien works so well because even though he draws from real life, he also draws on universal themes. He got so annoyed at people mistaking the Ring as a metaphor for the atomic bomb that he spent several pages explaining so in the forward to the Fellowship of the Ring back in the 50s. So, it's not an exclusively contemporary problem.

I love no-context big number posts

$760 million over how long, and what % of total unemployment benefits does that equal?

Looking closer, it was over the last 5 years, and (of course) all the fault of the previous administration

Still no clue about how big that actually is.

Sources are also disagreeing as to whether it’s even fraud vs Massachusetts sending people extra money due to accounting incompetence

this was difficult to look up. I am not confident in any conclusion I make here. I did find this thing from the maryland dept. of labor.

the budget for administering unemployment insurance in 2026 is $151 million, except that's the cost to administer it, not the funding pool it draws from. later on there is a chart of how many unemployment claims there were (a huge spike of 17.4 million in 2020, 10.8 million in 2021, and then back to a business as usual 1.1-1.2 million), but it does not say how much those claims were. Apparently the max you can get is $430 a month and you can only be on unemployment for 26 weeks -- unless a federal extension is in effect.

except that the population of maryland is only 6.3 million! they had 1.7 claims for every resident in 2021? no, they couldn't have. so this chart of the number of claims can't represent the number of people, it has to represent the number of payments on a weekly basis. so then the payments in 2021 capped out at $4.6 billion, and 2022 onward are $470 million.

and $750 million fraudulent payments out of $6.5 billion total is... 11%, assuming that every payment was the $430 maximum, which it likely was not. 11% seems like a pretty significant rate worthy of concern. I can find no information on the average payment as opposed to the maximum payment.

The audit only goes back to November 2020, but it might still cover benefits improperly paid in 2020? since the Maryland law is that you need to notify someone within 3 years if they received improper benefits and this is about uncollectible overpayments. So if that covers payments that were sent out over the course of 2020,before the time covered in the audit, then the total is like $13 billion, and $750 million of that is a bit over 5% (again assuming maximum payment of each claim)

this news piece has a statement from the department of labor that says the pressure was so high during the pandemic that they had to put everyone on paying-claims duty and none on should-this-claim-be-paid duty. Also it's nice to see Gina Cross get a job after the Black Mesa incident.

The audit itself does not say how much the total payments were, but the explanations it does have are damning: apparently they just don't check? They had to overhaul the payment verificiation system and then dragged their asses on it, The audit randomly selected 10 people receiving benefits and found that zero of them were being checked.

Whether or not this is a big deal depends entirely on information that doesn't seem available to us. This could be 5% fraudulent payments including the height of Covid when everything was all fucked up, or could be like 20% fraudulent payments starting in a year when they should have had their shit together, and in either case appears to have found severe and pervasive negligence in the department.

@nerdfuckerrr one of the most influential figurea in my adult life

Cars and Independence

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Raising kids in a walkable town really underscores the inconvenience and dependence of cars as well. The reality really is completely opposite from the belief. It’s hard to really get across that using a car is a barrier/limiting factor when you have babies and small children. And it’s hard to get across what a much higher quality of life you have when the stuff you access most often - daycare, school, train station, coffee shops, toddler groups - is within a ten-minute walk, so you just wrap the baby in a carrier, fall into step with a friend and go do it. I think that car-centered parents in America are living a much harder and more isolated life, and I’m sure it ripples outward from there. I think that the children in turn have more independence, more relationships, more control, more feeling of ownership of the spaces they move through.

"I don't understand how anyone could live in a way I think is bad for them, therefore they're all suffering and are too stupid to know they are."

tgis is so fucking funny to me. they accidentally Rock Lee'd a retired racehorse

imagine youre a fat horse and your new neighbour is a personal trainer

horse that reads Marcus Aurelius

I was wrong. they didnt rock lee him. this horse is literally Gai. and i wish he was my dad

The wealthy have hedge mazes while the rural poor have corn mazes. However, the rise of urbanization and the suburban middle class still leave countless Americans without a distinctive maze. If you elect me to Congress,

escape rooms

I feel like a secondary character in a koan. I posed a foolish question and have been brought to enlightenment.

This feels like 60k notes, easy

I fear a fresh wave of the plague

Update from twitter

i want to explain to people- the lower bit is accurate you probably pay way more in taxes/rent then a medieval peasants well as have less time off of work

I know someone else has commented this over the past three years but fuck it I have to say it, you only have 'less time off of work' because people do not consider the other forms of required labor 'work' in the modern era, because of the labor saving devices we now have.

Actually no now that I think of it there's another issue in the upper left so we'll START with that and then go on to 'work'. The thing left unmentioned was Serfdom. You didn't own your hovel. If you lived on land and were not a craftsman you were more like than not to be a Serf, which meant you were property and owned by your lord. You built a house? Well, it was on the Lord's land, and that means it's the Lord's house.

But the first part, oh the first part. Let's take an element we generally don't think about. Laundry. Simple chore, throw it in the washer and walk away right, let it run for an hour and move it to the dryer?

No. No washer. No dryer. You're soaking your clothes, scrubbing them with your bare hands, smacking them against things. Your whole single load may take an hour, but that's for one basket. The more clothes you have, the longer it takes, and then you have to set it all out to dry. That's a solid hour of actual work.

Same with cooking. Cleaning. Repairing clothing. House maintenance. keeping the grass cut down. Shoveling snow. Nobody's doing ANY of these things for you. You 'Labored' your job for less time, but every other element of survival was a fucking nightmare, so your actual FREE time was so much less. And yeah, somebody would be singing or playing a musical instrument... to keep you entertained and your mind busy while DOING all that labor. No books, no movies, no mobility (Serf, remember? Can't leave the farm ever!) You paid a tithe to the lord AND a tithe to the church! and what remained?

Was the food you generally ATE TO SURVIVE. Cause that's what you were growing in the first place, your own meals!

Guys, seriously, stop romanticising the 13th fucking century. It wasn't that good!

Sounds like a new generation learning that sometimes an ongoing popular tv series utterly fumbles the ending and there's nothing you can do about it

I think most people largely agree on the facts even as they disagree intensely with the implications of those facts (excluding Trump and his cronies of course who are making up entirely new facts).

should a government agent be allowed to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance? and would the overall death toll rise or fall if they were not carrying guns? it might make them more circumspect, if nothing else.

it's weird when the defacto leader of the anti-government movement is the president I gotta say.

whenever you say this, there is a 100% guarantee that you are skipping over the entire discussion and the entire discussion is "does this actually and accurately describe the event that happened"

because i have not seen a single person say "a government agent should be allowed to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance" and I have seen people say "a government agent should be allowed to shoot at a person who is currently and actively attempting to kill them" and when you characterize the debate as about the former question you are a liar and you know that you are a liar so stop lying.

yeah that's bullshit though isn't it, there are so many examples of situations where a cop shoots someone -- occasionally legally justified and occasionally not -- where if they didn't have a gun it would have been absolutely fine, because the shooting was driven by miscommunication or misunderstanding or sometimes malicious desire to punish perceived disrespect, but the victim was ultimately found to be unarmed or attempting to flee or not even realising the cop was there because they were deaf or distracted or whatever it was.

now of course this is America, many people are armed, I'm sure there must be situations where cops make a split second decision to shoot someone and it avoids an outcome where someone else would have been shot, like it would strain credulity if that never happened, but "cop escalates harmless situation into justified shooting in a matter of seconds" is a regular occurrence too and it kinda sucks.

The fact that you do not believe something does not mean other people cannot believe it.

Even if you think that it is obvious this person was not actively attempting to kill the cop, you are lying when you say the debate is over "should a government agent be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance?" And not "was this agent acting in self-defense?"

That was a lie, you told the lie, you knew it was a lie, and you chose to tell that lie. Just say you are sorry for lying and move on.

that's just dumb, at no point does someone shoot at the driver of a car in self-defence unless it's speeding towards a checkpoint and believed to be a suicide bomber or something like that, and even in those cases a number of confused innocents have been gunned down unnecessarily.

the agent might be legally justified in what they did but it's laughable to call it self-defence; the only thing they did by firing their gun was make the situation significantly more dangerous and also kill someone, if they had no gun on them nothing bad would have happened.

The fact that you do not believe something does not mean other people cannot believe it.

Even if you think that it is obvious this person was not actively attempting to kill the cop, you are lying when you say the debate is over "should a government agent be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance?" And not "was this agent acting in self-defense?"

That was a lie, you told the lie, you knew it was a lie, and you chose to tell that lie. Just say you are sorry for lying and move on.

you gotta obey orders:

and comply or die:

lack of obedience and compliance sets the stage to justify everything that follows and allows attempts to leave the scene after reversing to be interpreted as "domestic terrorism".

None of those people are saying that the debate is over "should a government agent be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance?" and none of them are arguing for that.

If ever in your entire life you find yourself saying that someone's position is "the government should be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance," and that person did not say those exact words in that exact order, you are wrong.

It does not matter if you say that they really do. It does not matter if you say that it is very obvious. It does not matter if you think that this is the end point of their argument. It does not matter if you think they're wrong. It does not matter if you are correct that they are wrong. It does not matter if you hate them. It does not matter if I hate them.

If they have not said those exact words in that exact order, then that is not their argument and you did not correctly interpret their statements.

That is not their argument and you did not correctly interpret their statements because you are extremely bad at interpreting other people's statements. You should know this because you are a human being who is alive. Much like accusing someone of being "pro-rape" or "supporting child predators," any human being who is alive should know that this is never a person's argument ever and any statement to claim that it is is a lie. No matter what!

Do not tell me what it really means. Do not tell me why it should be interpreted as something. You are extremely bad at understanding what other people believe and I am telling you something that every human being including yourself already knows: no person is ever arguing "a government agent should be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance" unless they say those exact words in that exact order. That is not ever what they are saying and you are wrong. Nope, you are still wrong.

it's true, most of the people making this argument only think that government agents should be allowed to execute a "deranged leftist" for non-compliance, where non-compliance is evidence of being a deranged leftist.

the bulk of people are in the neutral middle, merely observing that if you don't devote 100% of your attention to ensuring the emotional comfort of the officer screaming at you then they kill you on the spot and that's unfortunate but it's just the way it is, you brought it on yourself.

and some people are genuinely concerned with officer safety, and point to training standards that emphasise not standing in front of cars or shooting at people as they flee.

It does not matter that their position is wrong. It does not matter that it has bad implications. It does not matter that you can insult them. It does not matter that you hate them.

You do not have to convince me that their position is wrong and stupid, because I agree. There is no amount of further insults and no amount of further pointing out the obviously terrible behavior of the ICE agents that can cause me to agree more with you about the situation because I already agree with you about that situation.

And yet if they did not say the exact words "a government agent should be able to execute someone on the spot for non-compliance" in that exact order then that is not their position and you did not understand what they said and you are lying. Stop lying.

I think that's close enough? just need to invert it: "you will not be executed on the spot by a government agent if you comply".

now he did add:

only way to avoid death is by compliance, that's just the way it is.

("at the end of the day it was completely avoidable if she would have simply driven more carefully around the guy, then he would not have cared about her failure to comply and she would have been fine")

Brazen’s problem is that he’s derangedly hyperliteral.

’Unless they explicitly said word for word that they support feds executing you for noncompliance’ and he can’ understand it does not matter if the feds use a paper-thin dishonest excuse to cover for executing people for noncompliance if they and their supporters both know it’s a paper-thin excuse.

Argumate’s problem is that he considers certain so obvious they don’t need saying, and doesn’t realize Brazen needs them stated point by point.

There are positions that you can infer someone holds.

This is not one of them. This is a position that is never held and is always a lie told about others.

No person holds the position of being "pro-rape" and it is always a lie told about others.

No person holds the position that it is good for immigrants to murder people and it is always a lie told about others.

No person holds the position that child molestation is good and it is always a lie told about others.

And no person holds the position that people deserve to be executed on the spot for non-compliance and it is always a lie told about others.

The thing that is so obvious it shouldn't need to be stated, is that people don't hold the position that no person holds and is always a lie told about others.

The standard of proof is impossible to meet because no person holds this position and it is always a lie told about others. If you think you have identified this position, then you are wrong, and you are telling an emotionally flattering lie about others. If you think it is very obvious, you are wrong, and you are telling an emotionally flattering lie about others. The standard of proof is there to remind you that you have not identified their position, and instead you are wrong and you are telling an emotionally flattering lie about others.

I think a thing that's needed to be filled in here is the concept of 'for your safety, comply with the police' requires people to understand that the opposite of complying with the police are things like 'running away from armed officers' 'resisting with physical force' and 'hitting people with your vehicle'

And statements like 'for your safety, do not attempt to drive through police officers' or 'for your safety, do not attempt to punch out a cop' or 'For your safety, do not tell the cop you have a gun, and constantly reach for it to show him you have a gun as he tells you to just stop and keep your hands on the wheel' might be far more accurate descriptors of what not to do in situations around the police, but all of which can consistently be compiled into one simple statement of 'For your safety, follow the instructions given to you by the police'.

But as that allows for the flattering narrative of 'cops will execute you at a moment's notice' and...

THAT IS NOT "✨💖BABYGIRL💖✨"

THAT IS AN

EXTREMELY

and I want to be clear on this

EXTREMELY TRAUMATIZED

42 YEAR OLD MAN