We have a right to insist to be free and brave

In my opinion it's a lot more healthy to be able to own that you dislike someone for petty reasons than to do all kinds of mental gymnastics to make everyone you don't really vibe with out to be a bad person actually

It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.

since there is such an "english speakers who don't even try to pronounce a foreign mame correctly" epidemic, native english speakers often try to overcorrect and end up thinking they have a moral imperative to pronounce every foreign name correctly at all times. so i'm gonna hold your hand and look into your eyss as i say this: you can't. you can't pronounce every sound in a language you don't speak. and that's fine. it happens to the rest of us too. we won't be mad so long as you try your best.

Hearing your online friends' music taste and feeling like a total normie in comparison and then hearing your co-workers' music taste and feeling like a throat-singing/death-metal/electropolka fusion enthusiast in comparison.

walking around the dashboard at four in the morning stepping on all the creaking posts loud as fuck

not really a fan of the amount of people here who now hear “war crime” and immediately think “fun meme term”

i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that

Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that will companies are still trying to stomp out.

i think ultimately you do really have to kill that part of your brain that vividly imagines how you would redo parts of your life.

something that's always stuck with me is Adorno's critique of liberal research on fascism - that liberal scientists believe you can approach fascism in good faith by simply asking Nazis what they think about the world and then writing it down. He argued that fascism is itself a bad faith ideology, and that Nazis will not usually answer the question "do you want to exterminate all minorities?" truthfully, especially not when asked by academics (who are all Marxists/Jews/etc plotting to destroy civilization). So in order to accurately capture fascist sentiment, you have to conceal your intentions and basically lie to them. And there are real moral imperatives for social scientists to do this, in the same way that journalists go undercover in white supremacist groups to report on their activities and beliefs. There's even that famous East German documentary where the directors lied to a Nazi military leader about being West German filmmakers, got him drunk, and then just filmed him saying Nazi shit lol. So like the conventions of science itself, the idea that good research is necessarily always transparent, is a political assumption that shapes how you conduct research and acquire knowledge

Picking strawberries with a beautiful girl and I’m not even smiling I’m just picking the most strategic berries so we can leave and I can go answer emails