zoom-kaboom crow-tit monsoon

I personally hate any kind morality thought policing. I'm not Catholic or religious and I do not feel guilty over my thoughts. You are not an inherently evil person because you saw two athletes in an interview and went "Hmmm...... what if...." The Feds are not going to come banging down your door because you wrote about one band member dicking down the other and sent it to your friend.

Wondering about other people's lives is very human. Being nosy about their personal lives is very normal. People have been writing fiction about other people's lives since the dawn of time. Some people even manage to write New York Times Bestselling Books that are "historical fiction" or "alternate reality." It does not make you inherently bad to be curious about the details of someone's personal life. That's being human. Being nosy is kind of fun.

The problem, however, comes with the ways in which people engage with it, and involve the real people in this. Harassing an musician's real girlfriend because it doesn't fit into the RPF ship. Showing up at real sporting events holding signs about how certain teammates should kiss. Trying to get actors to sign art of them fucking their coworker. Flooding social media with comments using the celebrity's full name and speculation. There's a line, there's a fourth wall, and there's fandom etiquette.

I hate the question of "Is RPF ethical" because it feels like morality thought policing. Post your fics on locked accounts, censor someone's name when you tweet about it, blow up your groupchat with hundreds of "DID YOU SEE THE WAY THEY LOOKED AT EACH OTHER??" texts. It's not inherently evil to wonder what other people are doing when they're out of the spotlight. Kill the cop in your mind.

Some 10 minutes later the same friend interrupts the conversation again, audibly startled. "Fuck, guys, I gotta go" - and mutes himself.

That is harder to ignore. We stay silent for a minute.

Still, he is muted and not out - so his house probably isn't blown up. He took the time to warn us, so he personally is probably fine. And we know that discord does pick up the sound of explosion if it's happening close enough, and we haven't heard anything, so his immediate family is probably safe.

Further than that, there's no use to speculate. We won't know until - if - he comes back.

Slowly, we pick the conversation back up.

He comes back some 15 minutes later: "Guys, our hayloft is on fire". "How on fire?" - I ask. "Fully on fire". The cracking of the wood was loud enough to mistake it for the shooting, so it took awhile to notice anything out of the ordinary.

It's no big deal, apparently - no one was in the hayloft, not even the cat that likes to sleep there. The firefighters arrived 20 minutes later and even managed to save some of the hay. We chatted about dnd and the first season of arcane for 2 more hours.

It's a fun story, a cute one, even. But it takes it's place among others: the fact that every time I go to a bus stop I have to walk by my school currently constructing an underground facility so children don't have to stop classes with every air raid alarm that goes off. The fact that I celebrated my joint birthday with my uncle in candle light because of another attack on our power system. The fact that every explosion that i can faintly hear on discord as I talk to my friends, or that shakes the ground as I do groceries, or wakes me up at 2 am - carries real people with it being killed and injured. The fact that hearing the sound of shooting is enough for us to assume that "things are normal".

The normalcy of war is a terrifying and infectious thing - even for us, people living under under occupation and constant attacks. I can imagine it only gets worse as you get farther from the action. As we slowly approach the end of the 3rd year of this war going on, please, don't let yourself believe this is okay.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

her skills are abysmal = she is unskilled