The Luminous Warrior

10 years ago, I was watching my Potential and Opportunities dissolve and evaporate in an ocean of cheap gin and expensive whiskey.

But 5 years ago, I was in Rehab.

One of the exercises they had us perform was to imagine ourselves happy, 5 years in the future.

Many of us in that room had forgotten how to imagine nice things happening to them. A few snorted (well, I snorted), finding the notion that we’d even still be around in 5 years grimly humorous.

For about half of us, it was the last stop on the way down.

But I indulged the therapist. I was there, after all, because I did not want to die. So, I imagined myself, 5 years hence.

Happy.

It came to me all at once; an artistic remix on Norman Rockwell’s Freedom From Want, reframed with myself placing food at the table.

Sunday Dinner At My Place, I answered, when it came my turn to share my fantasy. I was asked what food I imagined eating.

It’s not the meal itself, I said, it’s the implications framed around it. Sunday Dinner At My Place means that I have a Place. It means that I have Family that will actually speak to me and friends who actually want to see me. It means money enough not just to feed myself but others too. It means having the time to spare to take the time preparing the meal.

A lot of nodding heads all around me. A struck chord. Many people with no Place, in that place. Nowhere that would lament their leaving.

5 years hence, as I lay down to sleep in my Home, with my Wife and my Son, surrounded by my Art and my Flowers, I reflect.

It was a long road. It was hard. We lost people. So many people. There were long days and long nights and hospital stays. Angry arguments with ghosts. I changed, in ways I never hoped for, or expected. Good ways, finally, for once. Slowly, against the backdrop of a world in chaos, I found my mind.

Sometimes, My Wife wondered aloud, what she did to deserve me. After some stumbling with my feelings, I eventually settled on an answer.

I’m a Rescue.

She gave me a Home.

And, so, I gave her a Family.

It seemed fair

This Sunday, my folks, which whom I have not had a shouting match in years, will come over for dinner. We will cook and eat together. My Friend became My Wife, and she took a piece of me and with it she made Our Son. There will be many hugs, and no violence. Good Things Happened.

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t know what the future holds.

don’t give up yet, ok?

If everyone drinks the strawberry fanta then no one gets poisoned at all, and actually morally speaking it is not actually wrong to expect other people to not poison themselves so oh yeah okay maybe I should have reblogged that other post because this isn't actually a trap but it's the other kind of thought experiment where the person who came up with it thinks they're deep and are ignoring or unaware of the obvious correct answer and if you point it out to them will start assigning "moral responsibilities" no one has ever concieved of before to try and convince you to drink the flavorade

Anyway pro life tip: don't poison yourself

“The family name ‘Murasame’ was given to me by my master. The given name ‘Tatsumasa’ is a combination of ‘dragon’ (tatsu), the [zodiac] year when I was born, and one character from my master’s name,” says Murasame."

And frankly this is just the biggest and best middle finger I've ever seen held up to Communists ever. By people who are originally from Cuba. Basically debunking all of the morons and idiots who think that we are at fault for what's happening in Cuba.

And thoroughly expressing why they will fight with every fiber of their being to make sure it doesn't take root in the places that they are living in the US.

And one of the best analogies I can hand over to this group of individuals is that they effectively in more pointed words call out what is happening in places like Cuba where people get sent there and trained as revolutionaries. Except these people are trained around potemkin villages. And it would be interesting to see what happened if we finally managed to completely destroy the regime That is literally strangulating its own population in Cuba.

A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.

"You should try DOTA."

"I didn't really like that. I heard about first-person shooters and those seem fun. Can you recommend one?"

"Have you tried DOTA? Just ignore parts of the game and it's basically what you want."

"I didn't like that. Can you recommend a good puzzle game?"

"Have you tried DOTA? Just ignore parts of the game and it's basically what you want."

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Alien 1: "Captain, I assure you, our ships can't be breached by anything weaker than a concentrated proton beam. They barely have lasers. We'll be fine."