Awed to see “Amanda Marcotte sucks, MTV’s Jackass rules” somehow become a universal healthcare talking point

argumate:

antoine-roquentin:

By 26 January getting up had become extremely difficult and I was shivering with cold. I felt I was having a high fever, and I was: 39C. Reports later said that the situation could develop extremely fast in the middle stage, but before I knew it, by that evening the fever was gone. It felt like having been to hell and back. That period from 21 January to the 26th was the worst time. I coughed so bad my stomach was hurting and my back ached. Those were some of the worst days in my life.

It was then that I realised I needed some spiritual support or maybe I couldn’t make it. So I watched my favourite anime show and seeing their normal, happy lives, I thought I may have to say goodbye to this life forever. But watching the show, the heroine had troubles in the first half, but she finally made it and succeeded in her career.

You see, I was going to fly to Japan in mid-February to go to a concert by Ayaka Ohashi, a Japanese voice actress and anime artist, but with the lockdown I thought everything might be cancelled. I had attended her solo performance last year, and after watching her I had decided I wanted to make a career out of managing voice actors. So watching the show, I thought: I must make it if I want to see her next concert alive. This really encouraged me and gave me some relief, along with the medicine. I dreamed twice that week that I met her. 

to think, people are stocking up on essentials when all they need to do is believe in anime

So I watched my favourite anime show and seeing their normal, happy lives, I thought I may have to say goodbye to this life forever. But watching the show, the heroine had troubles in the first half, but she finally made it and succeeded in her career.

catching the coronavirus literally the character stumbling in the opening sequence then continues running with increased determination

katherinebarlow:

nifeandaccurate:

katherinebarlow:

nifeandaccurate:

katherinebarlow:

I dreamt that there was a new meme that went, “If I dids it, I dids it. If I didsn’t, I didsn’t.” There was a third line, but I forgot what it was.

happy to report i’m back on my bullshit

and a rare variant

HOW DID YOU KNOW THEY WERE CAT MEMES IN MY DREAM

>:3€

THAT’S IT, THAT’S THE MEME FROM MY DREAM

thathopeyetlives:

Relatedly, there are three things I am very frustrated with about the modern internet. 

First, if you google an… unusual combination of words, such as ‘hypergolic use gundam’ (suppose you wondered whether Amuro and Char ever had to deal with nitrogen tetroxide and monomethylhydrazine), you’ll get mostly results that are missing one of the words. I often find myself putting words in quotes to make sure they appear – also there’s a tendency for Google to replace words with synonyms that are not. 

Second, searches for information about anything that’s a common article of commerce with consumerist marketing (clothes, consumer electronics, common tools, appliances, computers, DIY-tier 3D printers, firearms, jewelry, consumer gadgets, etc) tend to be totally polluted with commercial “review” sites, people who are trying to sell you something, and “educational” sites written by the marketing departments of vendors that are full of bad and slanted information and… just not the kind of information you find on independent message boards and the like. 

Third, Google is surprisingly bad at finding articles which contained specific unusual words together but you can’t remember exactly all of them. 

Went back to the old neighborhood for the first time a while, went to a bar & grill that I remembered as something else, seems a real neighborhood gathering spot

There was a kids’ birthday party and both the towheaded brats and their parents reminded me of my cousins who toured with the Dead before becoming scrubbed Philly yuppie lawyer families

Then that cleared and there was an adult birthday party, and it was like a stock video of an NGO – a within-tolerances friendly, acceptably raucous group of 8, diverse in all identities except all being 30s educated urban professionals. The type that college students that were neither hipsters nor bros/woo girls became I guess.

And I overheard, and honestly, it seemed like they weren’t really close as performing closeness. Like, they weren’t quoting Will Ferrell movie lines at each other but the class-shifted 2020 equivalent – deploying reference points they all individually could have a stock relation to, without that much direct relation between people.

And I started prewriting this… what, brief for the prosecution? Like, c'mon, if I was there in the first place, either then or now, it was ultimately cause I’m from a professional background too, inherited so that means I didn’t even have to do the work, be that cranking billable hours or facetiming together a local elite.

And I knew I was a gentrifier at the time, just back then in that neighborhood that meant creative professional families that bought a Craftsman cheap in 2002 and elbow greased it, or young artsy/food service/scumbags splitting a house 5 ways. Market gets harder, apartments go up, people don’t make the step directly from “young artsy scumbag” to “creative professional family” as directly anymore.

But when I lived there was another bar on that stretch that was really too normie for my taste but what that meant at the time was like, multiple TVs on sports and OSU/UofO stuff on the walls, and pool tables and families in sweatshirts, that probably listened to mainstream radio stations and were the target market for the stuff advertised there and that didn’t tweak me the same way, y'know?

While I was writing this, in a diner, there was a table of three kids maybe 30 planning a board/card game night, first picking a restaurant and then some games, describing and explaining the appeal of each. Then one guy left and the two remaining counseled each other – first he her about impostor syndrome involving her early career, “like a medical residency” where she sees several clients and makes a presentation in a day – therapist? LMT? nutritionist? Then she him about I forget even what.

And I can’t beef with the guys for bucking up their friends and planning to hang out, but the freaky thing was how… businesslike it was. The first part was not only like a meeting but it was like “holding meetings around a conference table” was their natural idiom, all keeping the flow and making sure each other felt valued for their contributions.

And the second part was like, therapy. They were performing “empathy” as a trained skill, and for however squishy it sounded were remarkably efficient at reorienting and remoralizing each other without actually addressing the issues they brought up, the imperfections in the self they gave up on perfection to at least admit.

And all dynamics are different, and I’m maybe a little undersocialized, but I have never seen people act like that, outside of professional workplaces. Like I came up in a professional milieu, around therapeutic professionals even – Freudian psych was still a residual thing! And even they reserved that for professional clients and were real people off the clock.

And like, to encounter this in a gaming group. Hanging out at the comic shop playing Magic, seeing grognards talk about L5R on IRC, Gen Xers snarking about LARPing Vampire and crossing your arms to turn invisible, nothing would have prepared me.

Hell, even moving to Portland in 2011, being pleasantly surprised at the multiple gaming stores, going to a Molly Crabapple-brand life drawing event of Frank Frazetta-type fantasy poses in the back room decorated as a castle and licensed as a pub…

I dunno, gentrification and displacement in general, recent shifts in Portland in particular, “PMC” stuff in politics, as vs. right-populists or left dirtbags culturally, vs. everyone economically, “bullshit jobs”, fights for control of the media, the narrative, the culture of the internet… they all seem accelerated by this feeling there’s this professional-therapeutic middle class… blob of humanity out there, no longer confined to dead-end suburbia, with no depth, no positive qualities, no discernable human qualities at all, no clear talents besides validating each other in their qualityness blandness, and if they’re not checked they’ll consume everything of value and just shit it out as validated nothingness. I feel it too.

Weird combination of humid and cold at night lately, so that you’re insulated from shock right when you go outside and it takes a bit before you realize how bad it is

Also everything metal is covered in a thin layer of frost, and exposed mechanical devices are especially sticky

Maybe the frost’ll finally get my plants to go dormant for the winter, tho

Welp, just hope we can squeeze enough legitimacy out of the rest of this electoral process before it shuts down for global pandemic

2020, babey

thrussy:

resinsculpture-deactivated20221:

resinsculpture-deactivated20221:

People on twitter call everyone they dislike a “grifter”, but this insult has not migrated to tumblr because no one here is making any money

Which is good, by the way. There’s nothing more degrading than watching grown adults act like pissy teenagers on twitter for clicks and tv appearances. Like, writing a callout over someone clicking “like” on the wrong post is dumb; but doing that on purpose, as a calculated machiavellian career move when you’re an adult who wears a suit to work and has a child… there’s something deeply pathetic, not to mention grotesque about it.

Here we can watch the pest in its natural habitat, and pretend we don’t know that it’s spreading, rotting apart the whole adult world.

Yeah, okay, some things about living in 2020 are nice

this is a Trump hat

like not in some heighten-the-contradictions or horseshoe theory “when you really think about it” sense, as in it is for sale on the official Donald Trump merch site

Remembering this one time visiting Habonim Dror’s Camp Galil where my friends were counselors in like 1998 or 2000, in the counselor rest hut in the woods where they all smoked cigarettes and bitched and got together after hours

And a girl was like “one of my [Hebrew word for a camper between 6th and 7th grade]s was crying on the grass and when I asked her what the problem is it was that all her bunkmates were discovering their bisexuality but she wasn’t, so I had to comfort her that it was totally okay to be straight”

And we all had a laugh