Greek Tragedy

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

It’s pretty likely that it’s a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:

No, no, no. Don’t base your deductions of psychology. Let’s talk chemistry. When you first press a button, there’s more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.

The light is green.

So. What happened? Cringe culture happened.

Try and imagine what would happen if this post wasn’t the “sacred texts” only ever seen in screen shots and in pinterest. Try and imagine any current pop culture detective media fandom creating this post today. They’d be slaughtered for being cringe by the time (in this case) Sherlock was mentined.

WE KILLED IT.SPREAD THE LOVE FOR

YOUR FAVORITE SHOWS

Water tight doors! You get a special training video on interacting with these correctly because they will literally cut you in half if you try and go through them while they’re closing!

Freezer vaults for food in the sub decks - you can only get into these with the correct code and they have very thick walls. Good luck if you get shut in one of these just after the last round of checks bucko

There are cameras everywhere…except in the crew cabin corridors. Also there are no windows down there because unless you’re an officer, you live below the waterline. Day and night have no meaning because everything is in the same slightly unsettling yellow light.

Don’t piss off the guys who deal with the rubbish. They have machines down there that can crush metal barrels

As well as morgues, cruise ships usually have one basic operating theatre with all the attendant horrifying equipment in it

One cigarette thrown carelessly in the wrong place WILL start a fire that will gut half the ship.

When we’re pitching side to side, the anchor swings out and then back in, striking the metal outer shell with a noise that shakes half the ship

People disappear overboard more often than you’d really want to be a thing

A lot of cruise ships now have theatres on board (usually towards the front) with all the potential for dark corners, creepy costumes and electrical calamities you could want.

>go outside

>love and support in many places as long you have the courage to ask for it

So she picked one shirt and one pair of trousers, carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time. This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed. My mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. She decided to tell him that night instead.

And then she forgot.

Anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face. “Paula,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Paula, my clothes are broken.”

It does not mean that you swallow the opposite view whole-hog without pause because, and I really need you to understand this: in any situation of opposing views both sides can be wrong.

A conflict does not magically transform one side into righteous defenders and another side into horrible monsters: both sides can in fact be really shitty.

The USSR, and for that matter the modern People's Republic of China, are excellent examples of "just because you profess to espouse a certain set of values, and even believe you do, that will not save you from actually being a horrible shitty evil person who acts in direct contravention of those values", or shorter form: ideology does not guarantee ethics. They murdered their own people on a scale it's genuinely difficult for us (that is, people in Canada, the US, the UK, etc) to imagine because we are incredibly privileged in that regard and yes I say that being well aware of the blood on our nations' hands; and the USSR was, and the PRC is, colonial, imperialist powers on par with any others you already consider appalling.

Yes, they were all those things while claiming the ideology of equality and worker's rights and so on. The ability of a system to lie about its motivations and functional systematic purpose should not be such a surprise, given that you've had it with our own. And yeah, if you're just coming to those ideologies it's pretty goddamn depressing to have to grapple with the fact that pretty universally systems of government that have actually arisen from them - especially after violent revolution - have tended to end up just as horrible and corrupt and violent as what they replaced.

(Turns out the problems of human violence towards other humans are not just accidentally inflicted on us by somehow stumbling into the wrong kind of systems, but are a really messy complex set of interactions between our individual and group traumas, how patterns of power/etc already work, how we interact with groups outside of our own and their dynamics, and . . . so on. And also turns out that you should be universally and incredibly wary of anyone who tells you that all you need to do is violently get rid of the Wrong People, who are Bad and intrinsically different from proper people, and that once this happens everything will naturally fall into place for the benefit of those remaining. Yes, even when those Wrong People are obviously doing bad things.)

But yeah: there were fucking gulags. Your neighbour just . . . disappeared. Members of your family just . . . .disappeared. Entire violent purges of a whole level of government happened. So did bloody imperial conquest.