...And This Is My House

You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. Outrage about hedonism is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radical rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.

it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

Nobody should buy GTA til they free Arion Kurtaj

What with GTA VI going up for pre-order i'd just like to remind everyone that rockstar conspired with the UK government to lock an 18-year-old away for life for hacking them.

Sound designing a vampire being hit in the face with a shovel is... challenging. Who would've guessed.

[Audio transcript: Ben Galpin voicing Jonathan Harker from Dracula by Bram Stoker. He says, "There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high, struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face," followed by a cartoon "bonk" and the Wilhelm scream. End transcript]

That's because this is Silmarillion

why is it so hot. why is it so hot. I am being punished.

My unnecessary two cents is that ppl in the imperial core are prone to viewing "benefiting from imperialism" as some sort of personal attack on their character or moral standing (& the higher moral ground they believe they have the more they resist this idea, imo) -- like you realize that its just factual. In a somewhat similar way to the principle that men as a class benefit from misogyny

The monetary plunder of imperialism on a gradient being "walled off" based on class race gender citizenship status etc. etc. does not make the imperial core a tragic outlier, this is the case in most if not all places, including places that are outside the empire. But fact of the matter is some people have imperial warfare in their countries or the ever present threat of imperial warfare in their countries and you do not, some people have to worry about imperial aggression and extraction on top of the million things that you worry about, and you do not, some people have to worry about massive currency fluctuation/degradation and the exponential impact this has on their ability to live their lives well or at all, and you do not, some people have to worry about access to minimally upwardly mobile jobs based on their ability to "speak english" regardless of what their native language may be or what the dominant language of their environment may be, and you, for the most part, do not. And on and on and on. Everything is affected. All the little or big things that add up to make some peoples' lives relatively easy and others' lives relatively impossible -- these things exist everywhere, but for those living outside the core, there's more often than not an added, significant layer of instability and insecurity and wanton destruction, alongside the pervasive feeling (and reality) of there being nowhere to go to escape from the way of things. Bc of how the world is ordered. Namely in a manner that ensures that wealth and bounty and opportunity only flows one way at the explicit expense of the other and the gates between these places are, largely, locked off