When my ex husband was around during my trips, he would freak me the fuck out. My body was in terror, I understood more than in that moment. The same lack of respect that I brushed off when not tripping sent me into a spiral.

It was a warning sign I didn’t take.

I had a wonderful combination of “strict” but also “there aren’t actually rules.”

I could have handled even unreasonable expectations if they had been communicated. But there was no structure at all.

I could ask permission to do something, do it, and then have that permission retroactively revoked. I could have an entirely normal day without anything seeming off, then be grounded for a week because there were dishes in the sink or something.

It never made any sense.

One of my favorite aspects is the way the ludonarrative/gameplay ties with the story.

I’ve always wanted to teach a high school/community college elective where we read Heart of Darkness, watched Apocalypse Now and played Spec Ops - to see how the same narratives in themes are used in entirely different settings and with different methods of storytelling, but how ultimately they all reach towards the same message about humanity and war and cruelty.

The older Call of Duty’s (maybe the newer ones, haven’t played since Black Ops one) often had messages/quotes that were pretty anti war when you died, but were ultimately sabotaged by the story. Spec Ops is probably the best game at understanding how to use the FPS mechanics as part of its storytelling.

Fallout 3. Slaughter the vault of police officers (who you grew up knowing), but grow a conscience when you meet the overseer. Take out armies of enclave soldiers, but let the weirdo Colonel Autumn walk away.

Spec Ops the Line is art. You don’t have a “choice” to not use the white phosphorus if you are going to play - but just like Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now - no one needs to be there/participating to begin with.

Cross stitch/knitting are both good for that.

You’re still sitting on your couch zoning out watching TV, but you do feel mildly productive.

A lot of the better creators are on Nebula. I don’t think they’d take Pewds though.

Also on Grindr. Every other ad.

My ex gets an allowance from his grandparents every week. They also bought him a house.

He’d get a job for a couple years, fuck around and get fired. Only got through college because I did his homework.

He has a house, he has a fridge full of food, he can go to restaurants and order out and take weeks off for vacation.

I worked full time through college, often three jobs. I still have massive student loans. I work two part time jobs, because the career field I went into is collapsing, and I’m not welcome as a trans person anyway.

I have always worked; he has not. I sleep on a rug and stack of pillows; he can pick out whatever luxury furniture he wants.

Work is entirely disconnected from reward.

As someone who is deep into cruising culture, very many “straight” men sleep with dudes. They’d never be in a relationship with another guy, but they don’t care who sucks their dick.

Flipping through your other comments - ever considered that the problem might be your personality?

Where are you having random gay men telling you how well they suck cock? Did you accidentally install Grindr?

To sum up - because I taught this to a kid yesterday - for a period, basically all life photosynthesized and oxygen was toxic to most living things. There were large growths of photosynthetic Cyanobacteria that pumped the air full of oxygen. Living things at the time (like, bacteria and microbes, nowhere near vertebrates) couldn’t handle all the O2 and died.

Iron had been taking in most of the oxygen, but it got all rusted up. There’s beautiful geological evidence of this.

This pic sexy as fuck:

I feel like Salvation Army pillows are going to be gross and hard to clean - might pick up bed bugs. Thrifting the stuffing/pillow forms and sewing them into t-shirts makes something quick and comfortable.

I’m sad that Alan Wagner is using AI. Love his work most of the time.

Y’all know that spiders can climb right?

And that spiders often make webs that look like this? Famously, funnel spiders?

I married a trust fund kid and then got saddled with his credit card debt after he dumped me.

Got to go on nice expensive vacations, ate ridiculous food on the top of Harrod’s in London. Now I’m making pillows out of old t-shirts because I don’t have a mattress.

The big lesson I learned is that it actually does not matter how smart, talented or hard working you are. It’s about having rich family.

Missionary trips are often glorified vacations. “Voluntourism.”

High school/college kids come over, build a school and then bounce. It would be better if that money was spent hiring local people to build that school. It relies on this racist thinking that somehow those poor Black or South American or whatever people are too stupid to know how to build things/survive, and they need some random white kids to come in and safe the day.

It’s for show, it’s to make the “missionaries” feel good about themselves and get some nice profile pictures instead of actually doing anything.

There are cases of “hospitals” being started by random people with no medical training - one I’m thinking of killed lots of babies. Somehow a random unqualified white person is just better and smarter, that they can fix all the problems.

It’s such a fucking farce. The real problems of the global south are that the centuries of exploitation and colonialism destroyed those countries economies and ways of living. The pseudo charity does nothing but exist as colonialism lite.

(I am excluding the rare groups of actually qualified people. I’ve talked to nurses and such who have done good work in places like Haiti. But they also did the same kind of work here - the kind of people I met assembling fentanyl test kits.)

Dune 2 walked so that StarCraft could run.

There’s always big error bars on these dates for that kind of reason. Actual archeologists are going to be careful with their language and say things like “the earliest evidence we have for bows is around 9000 BCE.”