Brain like a pinball machine.

I don't like that this is how it works either but most people seem primarily driven by their own interests, so to persuade them to align with you it helps to frame your goals in terms of how they benefit them rather than how they benefit you. Most people don't really care about you, especially if you're in a minority group they consider to be removed from their daily life.

There's this, and also...even in a case where the people seeing it are in neither group (not so applicable with citizens and noncitizens so-defined, but in other cases) or they're otherwise extra-insulated from it, "this is hurting people it wasn't meant to" hits the toddler-level sense of unfairness in a way that "this designed to hurt people" doesn't in itself.

It's all amusing and delightful, but it really shouldn't be surprising that the Germans enjoy Waffle House. It's branched out into umpteen different varieties, but the institution of the American diner, and the type of food it serves, were primarily created by German immigrants.

can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.

You're right that it's a useful term, and there really has been an awful overcorrection. That overcorrection was against a previous distortion, I will say, though--I really did use to see a "jump on every grenade" kind of attitude that was just as unhealthy. Ultimately, you can't make simple cheatsheet rules for social interactions, and people wanting them leads to all kinds of foolishness. What's fair to expect depends on the nature of your relationship (not a binary between "good friend" and "stranger", as observed elsewhere in the notes), and what the other person can handle doing, practically and psychologically (and i mean this in the sense of serious distress, not simple inconvenience).

Trans people just existing is no more sexual than when cis people just exist.

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

I am several of these things, but also...In anything big enough to call a society, I really do believe that the measure of how well it's doing is how many different ways people can live without undue difficulty.

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

One thing that helps me do the last one is that, separately, I have a problem with calling certain friends (of the same gender) by each other's names. If I do slip up, it's the same kind of thing.

@theorphicforest ROARKE

even more than "life imitates Shadowrun", I feel like this is "Life imitates Megaman Battle Network".

For a city to be walkable. It must also be sittable.

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