logorrhea et much silliness

yeah,

February in St. Louis. (And in our hearts.)

vietnamese people, Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghans, etc are allowed to never forgive your soldiers regardless of how guilty they felt afterwards for destroying their beloved country and people you do know that right? None of your victims owe you their forgiveness for your peace of mind because they will never get it, they don't get to come back home with their loved ones, they don't get back those years of suffering and then having to affront the consequences of your government's invasion and rebuild everything brick by brick, they're allowed to be furious and mad at all of you forever

tbh im not entirely immune to a villain with a tragic backstory but i do think villain origins are a lot more interesting when the focus is less "here is the original sin, the first big bad thing that happened to them that made them who they are" and more "here is the first time a person who maybe otherwise felt powerless in their life realized that they could hurt someone and get away with it"

you can get a lot more mileage out of analyzing a truly abhorrent character through the lens of like. what sort of conditions would allow or even incentivize this kind of cruelty? what kind of person benefits from those conditions and how? over the more typical who hurt them type analysis. imo.

If anyone is looking for more exploration of this idea, there’s a very good and approachable book on how it affects Black Americans, “Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum” by Antonia Hylton, which is partly a history of Crownsville State Hospital in Maryland and the people who were incarcerated there, partly a memoir of mental illness and radicalism in her own family and how Black radicalism and being conscious of the realities of racism become pathologized

“FMA is bad because it portrays war criminals as sympathetic, likable people” bro that’s the point. That’s the whole point. That is THE point. Did you think Ethnic Cleanser is some kind of special category of person that gets separated away from all the Good People at birth? Did you think there’s some kind of barn full of Genocide Doers that only gets deployed into the general public during world wars? Did you think assholes who do terrible shit in real life are never charming or likable or capable of doing good things and helping people? One of the best parts of FMA is how we the audience realize that some of our core protags have made irredeemable choices, and we have to reckon with the fact that they’re still people, with the unalienable rights and qualities thereof. Sorry if the Problematics aren’t constantly wearing a dunce cap and a list of all their crimes and this makes the media incomprehensible to you  

you need to get it out of your mind that psychosomatic illness is just “making up symptoms” when it’s actually much more like your body is being actively poisoned by chemicals released from your brain

This and also "your body is desperately trying to alert you to the fact that stress is killing you"

I don’t know who needs to hear this but if you’re celebrating Christmas you do not have pleny time. You do not have pleny time at all. We are in the 12 days till Christmas danger zone

my dear friend eyad (verified #27 on gazavetters) has struggled so much this winter, and continues to require aid to buy necessities. a small donation could be the thing that allows him to eat today. please donate what you can!

kinda crazy that your entire school life sets up an expecation of summer vacations and winter holidays and spring breaks and then you graduate and most workplaces are like "you get 2 weeks of PTO AT MOST and if you even think about using any of those days off on a major holiday there is a 50/50 chance your manager will kill someone and frame you for it"