Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

I had not noticed this before, but it's the Wandering Bard who tells the Exiled Prince he should challenge the Squire to single combat. leading to his infamous death by crossbow.

which, bard being bard, means she deliberately murdered that dude.

You've heard about the Madonna/Whore complex, now I propose Mary/Medea: a fictional mother must be an absolute perfect selfless saint whose identity revolves solely around her children, or else be a selfish abusive demon with no redeeming qualities whatsoever

ok I just wanna say if you see a kink on tumblr or wherever that really turns u on and then you try it irl and it doesn’t make u feel the way you hoped it would THATS OK!! You can let that kink live in fantasy!! There are a lot of things that turn my brain on that I don’t enjoy during actual sex!! Isn’t human sexuality interesting!!

Certified Sex ED Post !

You don't even have to try them out IRL. You're allowed to find things hot in fantasy that you'd never do IRL.

Actually I love voting for the lesser evil. It's less evil. I support that whole heartedly.

Like. Less evil is clearly a better option that more evil. I don't get why this is even a question.

Anyone else who clowns on this post will get blocked immediately and with impunity.

Since the r-slur is making a comeback (you know, the word that starts with R, has six letters, and ends in D), I'm gonna make a little PSA:

i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking

what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp

like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have

like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious

now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude 

and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude 

and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker

and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey 

so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?

this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker! 

i mean if you look at how npc’s talk about their pokemon, they’re service animals mostly. some of them are just pets. apparently they really enjoy sparring, so you let them battle other people’s pokemon for socialization, it’s like going to the dog park.

hell yes i’d be mad if i took my chronic pain support chow-chow to the dog park and some asshole with four rottweilers and a husky was like SIC EM THUNDERNUTS even if my dog enjoyed the tussle at first.

look, kid, the paras helps me weed the garden. it’s not a special forces attack paras. it’s just a bug that eats dandelions. please calm down.

This is precisely why Cooltrainers are exiled to the mountains

It’s not the trainers’ fault, they’re going about their god damned business trying to get badges and go to the Pokemon League and stop legendary Pokemon from fucking shit up and save the world, but they’ve got fuckin’ Hiker Willy stopping them on the path and running over here like;

“PLEASE WILL YOU STOMP MY TWO GEODUDE INTO THE EARTH!”

Like, fuck off, if Willy didn’t want my Swampert to one-shot his hiker helpers then he shouldn’t be trying to harass unaccompanied 10-year-olds halfway up a mountain. I mean, at some point, ya gotta know what a trainer looks like, and the majority of them are little tweens running around by themselves. These are little twerps trying to go up against the Elite Four, they’re not messing around.

Hiker Willy is asking for it. He’s asking me to kill his Pokemon. 

The notes on this post are an absolute joy.

This is more of a martial arts thing but here at least if you show up at a new gym and annihilate every partner you spar with, either nobody will spar with you anymore, or one of the strongest fighters at the gym will wipe the floor with you to take your ego down a notch, and I feel like that’d transfer over fairly well culturally

Like yeah it’s all fun and games dropkicking noobs and exchamging nothing until Brianna, 36 year old brown belt in the women’s 180lb division, makes you eat your own elbows

The trainers on the routes vs the people in the city behave very differently, but it’s still the matter of fact that most trainers are actively seeking YOU out for a battle. You normally don’t go up to a person and ask them to battle you (EXCEPT in Paldea. It’s their custom for you to ask for a battle instead of them rushing up to you (because of the open world aspect of the game making the old habit unsuitable for exploration.)). What happens is that if you even brush past a trainers field of vision, they will stop you, run up to you, proclaim some weird nonsense, and then lock you into a battle that you:

And then THEY get salty when you beat them! And if you happen to lose? They mug you and force you to retreat to the last pokemon center you used even though they were the last mandatory trainer in your way to the next town on a VERY long trek of road. To us, the route seems like a small hike lasting up to a minute or two on the longest routes, but to the characters and in the show, it’s the equivalent of taking a day’s or WEEK’S journey, running up to some thug who beats you in a battle, and now you have to rush to the pokemon center you last used, further away from your destination, going down the same route you took, because some asshat is blocking your way and is forcing you to make ANOTHER day’s or week’s journey to heal your pokemon. The worst part about this whole ordeal? They don’t even have the contempt to not challenge you again. They WILL challenge you again, they WILL mug you again if you lose, and you WILL make that walk again afterwards, so of course you have to beat some sense into them. You are only practicing self defense at that point, so don’t feel bad about beating some kid’s pidgy with a motherfucking Arceus if it means having the teach someone a lesson on not having someone mug you.

On the other hand, people in the city, especially ones that are shown to talk about or seen to have pokemon, generally don’t fight you, ask you for fight, or lock you into a battle unless it’s at a battle facility. Could you imagine how bad traffic would be if locking eyes with everybody who owns a pokemon over at Castelia City or Lumious City where there are streets filled with people getting to and from places? That’s why most battles outside of battle facilities in those city are thugs and… Secret agents? battling you in off path alleyways. They are literally trying to mug you.

If anything, it makes more sense for an ace trainer/cool trainer on or near Victory Road to challenge and turn you away if you lose to them. They are trying to get to the league too, so if you can’t beat Ace Trainer Pablo on the literally road to the league, what chance do you even have against the Elite Four, let alone the Champion. Ace Trainer Pablo has a reason to block your path at Victory Road, but when Hiker John blocks your only path to the next town or city after journeying for days, you guys feel more sympathy for him while calling Pablo a try hard? Route trainers are a menace, and if they were meant to be jovial and casual experiences, then don’t be a sore winner and challenge the same guy over and over again until they beat you because they got sick of you blocking their route to grandma and complain on how you lost even though you beat them several times before. If you were ever really concern for your opponents pokemon, you wouldn’t block them to the nearest pokemon center and force them to make the trip back home.

"But if this other world has always operated according to video game logic, why is the isekai protagonist literally the first person to figure out all these basic mechanical exploints" well, largely because litRPG isekai is merely the latest flavour of I've Been Transported To Another World Where Everyone Is Stupid Except For Me, a venerable genre that's been a going concern at least since Mark Twain.

When I was a kid, it was American sci-fi authors writing stories about shitass engineering majors getting portal-fantasied to alien planets and single-handedly saving civilisation on the strength of being the only person in the world who knows what a flowchart is, and very little has changed – right down to the weirdly inverted character arcs where the loser protagonist discovers that they don't actually need to engage in any self-reflection at all because the very traits that rendered them odious in their native society are what make them God here.

One thing about gacha that I think gets overlooked by critics, (perhaps because they have the good sense not to play the games in the first place) is, rather than monetary investment, how much time investment, sometimes even moreso than monetary investment, these games drain from users.

Essentially every gacha has a steep resource cost for utilizing its characters, requiring hours of grinding in repetitive content that adds little to no value for the player. Furthermore, most have "dailies" requiring a login every day. This combines to create a system in which most players log in every day, to spend too much time on content that does not actually satisfy them

Now obviously this whole thing is part of the gacha virtual casino system, keep them coming back and invested so they're more willing to spend money eventually. It all does come down to money in the end. But it is a little weird to me that even those criticizing the game design of gacha don't often focus in on this. Because 1) as a game design element this is atrocious but also 2) Many gacha fans brag about being "f2p," and know that they personally can control their spending habits (even as the genre preys on those who can't), but they ignore how they might have protected their wallet but found several days of time disappearing. It's something worth warning about, I think.

As a kid, when your parents are poor, you're poor. If they don't have money, that means none of you have money. But if someone's parents are rich, that doesn't necessarily mean the kid is. Sometimes rich peoples' kids aren't rich kids, they're just some rich freak's exotic pets that can talk but aren't allowed to.

That’s… not how class works

OK, so- my partner was adopted by a rich woman when he was a baby. She's from a prominent family, practically royalty where we're from. She certainly had the means to send him to fancy private school, give him good food, nice clothes/toys, premium healthcare... she chose not to. According to her he was lucky to be "adopted out of poverty" at all and should have been content with what she deigned to give him. And she reminded him of this constantly, all through his childhood.

She dangled the promise of uni in exchange for good behavior and good grades- with terms and conditions, of course. And filling her laundry list of demands was something like pulling teeth whilst jumping through hoops. In the end, did he get to go to uni? Of course not. (And certainly being queer/trans on top of it all did not help things whatsoever).

He cut her off after high school, and when I met him a year ago he had been working as (the equivalent of) an UberEats driver for a living for the last few years, including through the pandemic. (Sixteen hours a day for the equivalent of $6 (six) USD, not including the gas for his shitty rundown scooter; caught COVID twice, suffers from chronic fatigue to this day).

And to this day he still has to be selective about which of our ~leftist anarcho-commie~ friends he divulges this part of his background to- cos all they hear is "raised rich" and then suddenly he's not One of Them because "well teeeeechncially :^) you're from the oppressing class...". Like.... shit, man!

Social rules don't mean shit when it comes to abusive parents. Even rich ones.

Probably especially rich ones.

people are totally on board with the concept of "sufficiently rich people are above the law, and this is bad" but refuse to connect that to the concept of "this also includes laws that protect children from abuse and exploitation"

like we understand "the ruling classes get and maintain their wealth through cruel exploitation of those less powerful" and we can't wrap our heads around "a lifetime of this cruel and merciless behavior being valorized by your peers probably doesn't predispose you to suddenly changing gears once you have a helplessly dependent child that's totally under your control."

like yeah the rich are our enemies in this ongoing class war, absolutely, it's an Us or Them situation to save the planet. but if you don't give a shit about saving the enemy's children too, i don't think very highly of your motivation or your methods.

oh, here's a relevant example I saw just the other day:

A fun fact: my mom was in the upper middle class as a teen/child. She moved out the day she turned eighteen bc her father was horribly abusive. she had NO ACCESS to the income her parents had.

But her parents' income was still counted when she tried to get help from the government for her college classes.

Financial abuse is a thing. Financial abuse is a thing people use against their KIDS TOO. like, someone can be the spouse of a rich person and not have ANY real access to that money bc their name isn't on anything and they're not given a card or money.

reading about the development of hybrid rice in china just makes lysenkoism more depressing

ok some dates

My point is that the Soviet persecution of agricultural scientists and silencing of genetics was going on at around the same time that agricultural science was most important and urgent. I don't know if the timelines in China and the Soviet Union were really so different, lysenkosim was popular in China until the mid 50s. But the point is that agricultural science was not, you know, expendable, this wasn't just some dispute among experts in an esoteric subject. It was a matter of whether it was allowed to do some of the most important scientific work possible at that moment in history.

I'm not like Mad at anyone who does this and I'm obviously not in charge of how anyone else tags shit on their own blogs, whatever, but it's always bummed me out when my sex Ed posts get reblogged and tagged with 18+, minors dni, etc. personally I actually very much want teenagers to learn about their bodies and safer sex but I guess I'm just the guy who wrote the thing.

by and large I am not an angry man but once I watched a fellow sex educator present to a room full of college students and, upon being gently challenged by one of the students who objected to them describing sex as something that happens between adults, said with very palpable disdain "I don't want to talk about kids fucking." and I was so angry about it that I made myself nauseous.

not just teens, either. every couple years I give up my Sundays for a few months to teach sex ed to 4th-6th graders, unpaid. and I don't do it because it's always fun or easy or great for my health, I do it because those are human people with changing bodies and feelings who deserve to have someone who gives a shit take the time to talk honestly with them so that they might make less painful mistakes later.

ah, this has gotten notes. now we begin a game of Is Someone Going To Call Me A Pedophile For This.

here's the thing about sex ed: it *should* happen throughout a person's entire childhood. kids start to figure out they have a body with genitals as toddlers. contrary to what fox news thinks, it isn't encouraging sex with kids to sit down with them and explain like, the names of their body parts and why they might feel certain ways. that is in fact how you prevent sexual abuse, by giving them the language and understanding to describe what's wrong.

and then when a kid hits puberty, they go through that stage all over again with new body parts and urges, and need new language and new guidelines on what's healthy and what's not. denying them that language and knowledge does nothing but put them in danger.

The rule of thumb is not "listen to marginalized people about everyone's experiences", it's "listen to marginalized people about their own oppression".

It's not "listen to the most marginalized person in the room", it's "listen to the people who have actually had the experiences being discussed, instead of assuming what those experiences are like".

It's not "stop having an opinion, shut the fuck up, and absorb uncritically whatever a marginalized person has most recently told you", it's "everyone knows their own experiences best, just like you know your's, and it's important to listen to different perspectives in order to truly understand the problem".

Marginalized people don't know everything, and certainly aren't a monolith. The whole point of that idea is just to get people to listen to each other. If all of us are doing that, and genuinely trying to understand others without making assumptions or abandoning critical thought entirely, we'll get there in the end.

Even then, sometimes, simply due to the fact that we are human, you will find a marginalised person who has a VERY bad take about the problem. That will happen. Its normal. There are idiots everywhere.

You should listen to multiple marginalised people, and then come to your conclusions. Just because someone is marginalized, does not make them immune to having bad takes.

Resist the Calvinist urge to believe that some people are, by birth, members of the Elect Correct Take-Havers. Gay people can be homophobic. Women can be anti-feminist.

And don’t forget that the systems of oppression you’re most familiar with may not map to other experiences, cultures, and countries! Race might be the definitive axis of oppression in the USA, but it blinds us to other forms of oppression elsewhere (ethnicity, religion, caste, class).

I sometimes see people argue about one of these circles as though it were all three circles.

Sometimes something can totally make sense in-universe, and fit with the themes of the story, the characters, etc... And you just don't like it for whatever reason. Maybe it wasn't done well in spite of that, or touched a nerve, etc.

Maybe you loved a story, and it was an excellent exploration of a character, but it would be totally fair to call out the technical nonsense, and how, even in-universe, it doesn't add up.

And maybe you thought this episode of a show was GREAT! But it was non-canon, nothing made sense, and, ultimately, it was UTTER NONSENSE.

And so on, and so forth. Heck, you could fairly add more circles to this. I'm keeping it simple with three.

My point is mostly that there's nuance to opinions, and sometimes, someone not liking something in a story has nothing to do with whether it made sense, or complimented the narrative.

Those things can be separate points. Stories doesn't have to be a failure at everything to be disliked, or succeed at everything to be liked, and arguing as though that were the case is silly.

it's so wild when people complain about religious inclusion like "oh so you think THEY should get special privileges/accommodations to do x, y, or z??"

and the things they're talking about are like. exceptions to rules or norms that in themselves shouldn't exist. yes Richard, we actually should have diverse meal options at work events to accommodate people with different diets. yes, people should be allowed to take time off to be with their family during whatever holidays or life events they so choose. yes, people should be able to wear clothing that makes them comfortable. nobody should be happy about these restrictions existing. stop bitching about the singular jewish or muslim person in your workplace and realize that everyone deserves better.

I had an interesting experience recently, which I feel like culturally Christian people might benefit from hearing about. I've been recently in the process of helping to plan an event. Many attendees at this event keep kosher. Since kashrut is a very specialized dietary restriction, which I know not all venues can accommodate, my first question to all of the potential venues I've looked into has been "do you allow outside kosher catering vendors, or otherwise have some way to allow for kosher catering?"

One of the venues I reached out to replied that they were "capable of providing for our dietary needs." Now, since I'd asked about several possible catering options, and since they'd only replied generally and without actually specifying which they were saying they could do, I was a bit suspicious. So I followed up, and asked what exactly they meant by that: did they allow outside caterers in general? or did they have a specific kosher catering partner? or could they actually cater kosher food themselves? what?

Their answer was – and I swear I'm not making this up – that they didn't allow any outside caterers, and couldn't cater any food which was actually kosher, but that they could provide us with a menu that included "knishes" and "potato, pancakes" [sic], and so hey, that was basically the same as providing for our dietary needs, wasn't it?

Now here's the thing:

The dietary restriction shared by the most people at this event is keeping kosher, but one of the attendees, who doesn't keep kosher, has a severe peanut allergy. If we had done what we were planning to do and simply specified "peanut free", and if the venue had decided, like they were apparently willing to do for the kosher food, "well ok, it's not actually peanut free, but it's mostly peanut free, and that's basically the same thing"? They could have literally killed her. And if I hadn't specifically asked, in detail, about kosher catering first, I might never have known about how lax they were about providing for dietary restrictions in general.

Now could we have explained the nuances of kosher restrictions to this venue and tried again? Yes, possibly. But their unwillingness to even try on the first pass made it abundantly clear that they were not a safe venue to work with on allergy grounds. We crossed the venue off our list immediately, and I reached out to other people in the area who I knew might be planning similar events in the future, and warned them to never use this venue, either.

Accommodations like this are instances of the curb cut effect. If you don't personally have a diet or a family obligation or clothing needs that need accommodating, it's easy to get annoyed at the people you see who are loudest about asking for those accommodations. But having those options available helps everyone, and the fact that some workplaces and and businesses and event vendors refuse to accommodate these needs should be a red flag to everyone.

Maybe you don't care about kosher or hallal food. Maybe you've never had reason to take off work at an unusual time of year, and maybe you've never wanted or needed to wear anything unusual. But today it's your Jewish or Muslim coworker, and tomorrow it could be you or someone you care about – with a surprise medical diagnosis that limits your diet, or with a sudden family emergency at an inconvenient time of year, or with a sensory problem you've struggled with your entire life but can no longer mask, or who knows what else. We all deserve better, and the people who are openly saying so are not your enemies.

One of the overlooked but very scary things about being a higher support needs autistic (or anyoe with developmental disability) is that you have no choice but to trust your caregivers a lot of the time even if they don't deserve it or if you are skeptical. People with lower support needs who can keep themselves safe and don't have uncontrollable violent outbursts /harmful stims/impulses/property destruction/etc take for granted the ability to make their own judgements freely, isolate when they need to , say no to all touch when they need to, keep their important things with them, etc. I wish more people would understand that not everyone has those abilities.

the problem with the current wave of discord phishing scams is that I don't think you can blame people for clicking links without checking where they go. internet safety isn't really taught in schools anymore, sure, but there is literal research being done on how the omnipresence of social media has eroded people's ability to parse what we would otherwise identify as untrustworthy behaviour. it's blaming a structural problem on individuals

if you wanna hear someone explain this effect better than I can, check out this video essay that goes into the problem in more detail

The trouble is I know it’s a rickroll and want to click it to complete the joke, but also don’t want to because such obvious bait could easily not be even though I trust this user.

It’s like the feeling of not being able to sneeze

I promise it's not a rickroll

This post actually serves as an illustration of something I've talked about before - the shift toward mobile devices as the primary means of accessing social media, if not the internet as a whole, is also eroding a lot of understanding of internet safety. On desktop, I hover over those links and...yeah, I can see that they're not rickrolls! What it is, is right there in the lower left hand corner of my screen. On mobile? I'd have to click to find out! Which means it's easy not to know a link is malicious until it's already turned your phone into a heating brick that doubles as an advertising screen while mining crypto for some random dickhole!

It's especially bad, because the kinds of safety features that are removed from mobile are ones that...you often don't notice that you miss. After all, how many links that you glance over in that little hover preview ACTUALLY turn out to be malicious, or even pranks? Maybe 1 in 1000? Less? Maybe more if you have a friend who really likes Rick Astley. This isn't the only thing like this - mobile platforms are notorious for stripping out "extraneous" features that are actually there for very good safety reasons.

It's a very real problem, and yeah, it's systemic, not just individual people being willfully ignorant.

All that said though, you can get a preview of where a link goes on mobile by holding your finger on the link for a few seconds (at least on iphone).

This is true, but it's very different to have to take 5 seconds to make that check actively than to have that check take less than 1 second and do it passively

I've seen a few security advocates discussing this exact thing, it's a serious problem

Also, url shorteners/redirects kill even that remaining ability to check the link on mobile. Wanted more info than href.li before clicking? Tough.