And Everything Nice

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”

It’s genuinely funny how people say supporting the “lesser evil” is wrong and then push for violent revolution, as if a violent revolution is not evil. Countless innocent people would die in the fighting, the disruption of society would lead to deaths from starvation and a lack of medicine, etc. Violent revolution will not be glorious. No war is glorious.

I don't think people in the notes understand what this tweet is saying. It's not saying it's impossible to be born with a mental health issue, but that the issue isn't set in stone. Bipolar disorder can be trauma induced. Schizophrenic people in less individualistic, more accepting societies hear kinder voices. These are actual things you can look up.

I thought for the longest time I would feel nothing but suffering because of the dominant narrative surrounding mental illness. My parents were literally told by a psychologist I am "a severe case" and have no future. But guess what? When I got away from my abusive parent, it was incredible how much became more manageable than before. I'll never be "normal" or even be able to live alone, but I feel better than before. And I need everyone to know there's hope for you when you never expect it, even if you were in part "born like that".

“I wish ancient people preserved their writing and artifacts better” I write in electronic signals on a piece of hardware that can’t retain its efficacy for more than a few decades.

Time to laser-print my entire blog on titanium plates and bury them underground.

brb etching my one-star yelp review of the sheet metal supplier that sold us shitty copper on a granite slab

We are never going to give this guy a fucking break are we

Ea-nasir knows what he did.

But more importantly, WE know what he did. Because it got written down in some rocks.

The funny part is that clay tablets are supposed to be ephemeral. When you’re done with them you just soak them in water, smooth them out, and re-use them for a different message. They weren’t meant to be any more permanent than an email.

The only reason we still have that particular clay tablet is because a. Ea-nasir was a huge weirdo who collected all of his hate mail, and b. his house later burned down, and coincidentally did so at exactly the right temperature to bake the collected tablets into pottery rather than destroying them.

It’s basically the equivalent of an email getting inscribed onto a steel plate by accident.

ok. I'm in the world. now what am I supposed to do

different schools of thought I suppose

Can’t stop using the AI text bot to come up with Drag Race monologues

The people that think trans people want to force people to have sex with us have the same energy as those people in the early 2010s who seemed to think that if gay marriage was made legal they’d be forced into a lesbian sex colony against their will or something

Stop asking about the lesbian sex colony. It doesn’t exist.

new ideologies we've been testing internally for release in 2023:

hi everybody! we've had people point out that we already rolled out a preview build of 'astrology girl race science' and would like to assure you that the 2023 release will include brand new features like 'pan-Scorpio nationalism' and 'homestuck themed ethnostate'

who up delaying the inevitable

thought this was neat

Whenever I see people discoursing online about how all fiction must model good behavior and explicitly state that any bad behavior depicted is wrong, lest someone in the audience mistake it for “glorifying,” all I can think of is that line from Arrested Development where Buster, in his mid-30s, objects to something by saying “that’s not the way mother is raising me”

Like yeah maybe YA books and kids’ cartoons have a responsibility to demonstrate the difference between Right and Wrong, since the audience is, like, actual children, but if you’re consuming literally anything more advanced than Disney XD’s Ducktales, you should absolutely be expected to bring your own moral framework from home and not need your media to spoon-feed morality to you

if you see a show about a a man manufacturing and selling methamphetamine while abusing his wife and murdering people and you can’t tell whether the author intends for you to think his actions are right or wrong? That might be more your problem than the text’s. You might just, at that point, be an idiot.

[banging on the notes of this post with a broomstick from below] yo shut the fuck up in there

By the way the reason you should care about AAA games being horridly broken and unstable isn't just because you're being ripped off, but because it's the most common sign of horrific workplace practices like crunch that are absolutely abusive management and which both lead to shittier games and more importantly, the ruined health or even deaths of the actual game developers.