once again i ask of you to please stop looking towards celebrities and influencers for political commentary and their takes on catastrophic and inhumane world events and to instead focus your attention on experts, journalists and world leaders
I think the most terrifying part of any relationship is the ongoing awareness that you are going to have to trust someone when they appear to like or love you. There is no objective way to check your status with someone, no app that will say "they like you overall but are mad at you right now, specifically for x or y or a vague z thing that you didn't even clock when it was happening. But! if you send them a nice card and small gift, they will forget about it and return to base level affection"
instead, you have to just....keep having a relationship with that person, doing big and small things with or for them, and praying that you will both be brave and evolved enough to raise x/y/z as an issue if it genuinely is problem.
Mortifying ordeal of being known, down to your very gluons, and disliked.
I recently had to do a project in one of my psych classes, and man, I knew that CBT was used for every little thing, but seeing over and over, "do CBT! CBT is the best for every mental illness!" was so jarring. I'm absolutely biased because of my own experiences, but I just don't think it's as universal a treatment model as it's touted.
If you didn't benefit from CBT, it's not because you're lazy or didn't try hard enough or lacked intelligence or foresight into your own needs. Frankly, it's a therapy model that (I think) shouldn't be the only readily-accessible model and among the only therapy models covered by insurance. Some of us should not be treated in a CBT model and that's okay. It's not a sign of poor character or unreasonable demands, and if you don't think it's a model that works for you, then it's your right to express that!
Let me just preface this by saying everyone is allowed to have their own opinions, TOTK is a really fun game, and I'm glad that other people have been able to enjoy the story as well.
...But I'm being dead serious with my complaints about the narrative being 100% imperialist propaganda. And I'm getting really tired of people replying to those posts by saying it can't be imperialist propaganda, because imperialism is bad and the game says that Hyrule is the good guys.
Like, guys. That's not the argument you think it is. Yes, I am aware that the game tells us Ganondorf is a flat, one dimensional character with no ambitions, interests or motivations beyond destroying the entire world for the hell of it, and also it's totally not racist because he's green, not brown like literally every other member of his race. Unfortunately literally all of these things are kind of the entire goddamn problem.
See, the thing is, everyone trying to make these arguments is accepting the game at face value. Hyrule is the perfect and almighty nation chosen by the demigod Zonai, and whose royal family has the right to rule due to their divine heritage. The other races exist to serve the glory of Hyrule, and they're happy to do it. Ganondorf is pure evil and must be stopped at any costs.
But that's not how anything works. The story informing me that Hyrule is the ultimate good that has done nothing wrong is the whole goddamn reason why I don't trust Hyrule at all. There's always more of a reason than that. And the game fucking suggests there was more going on! Ganondorf mentions Rauru has repeatedly 'invited' the Gerudo to become Rauru's subjects, and let's be clear here, it doesn't matter how peaceful those 'invitations' were, when the guy who owns every single magical nuclear missile in the world repeatedly demands you surrender to him, there's always going to be an implied threat of 'do it or get magically nuked'. Just that power difference alone shows us exactly why Ganon would feel threatened enough to invade. It's because Rauru was holding a gun to his head, and Ganon was expected to just trust that he'd never pull the trigger.
And yes, even if it wasn't intentional Hyrule was always threatening to wipe out the other nations, considering the entire royal family walked around openly wearing their magical nukes as cute accessories. If they couldn't be safely hidden away, there wouldn't be four other secret stones sitting untouched in a vault until the last second.
But that's never acknowledged. Of course Hyrule is the only nation with the right to the secret stones; even if other races get to touch them, they can only have them if they swear eternal blind loyalty and servitude to the glory of King Rauru and Princess Zelda. Ganon wanting to have one magical nuclear bomb out of a stockpile of eight of them is proof that he's dangerous and evil. I mean my god, what if he just walked around all day wearing a magical nuke and using its power for his own benefit, that would be terrifying. It's only okay when Hylian royalty does it.
And you can't argue that Ganon betrayed his own people, considering we don't get to know fucking anything about his relationship with his people. He's shows as the leader of the Gerudo, we're told he's a hero to his people, he has soldiers that loyally follow him into battle... and then oh nevermind, they all hate him and will spend eternity trying to atone for sharing a race with him. How did the entire race do a complete 180 in the span of at most a few months? Who cares, what's important is that now they accept they exist to serve Hyrule so they get to be the good guys now and we don't need to know why they were following Ganondorf, or why they stopped following him.
Basically my point is that yeah, I fucking know how the game insists everything went down. That's the entire reason I think it's imperialist propaganda, because the entire story feels like Hylian propaganda to conceal and justify some horrific atrocities that caused all of this. I literally do not believe that I'm getting the story through reliable narrators, especially considering that the only people allowed to actually tell me the story are all the characters that have the most reasons to be heavily biased in favour of Hyrule.
When the game shows me protagonists that have a massive amount of power and control over the entire world, then says the bad guy doesn't like that system just because he's evil, and literally nothing and nobody in the game says anything to oppose that take, I have some questions about what the fuck the story isn't telling me. And I'd really appreciate it if people would stop trying to argue with me just by telling me to stop asking those questions.
A frustrating development with the growing lack of reading comprehension I've personally noticed is an emerging fervor of insisting things aren't canon unless they are explicitly stated beyond all reasonable doubt.
I can not emphasize enough how harmful a mindset this is to have. Yes, it's wonderful to have characters outright say "I'm trans," but to deny a character's identity for not saying that is dangerous.
Plenty of real people prefer not to use specific labels. Historically, people didn't have our modern terms or modes of expression. Many modern cultures don't use these terms, either, and plenty of people within those that do can't safely openly identify.
If the only representation you accept as canon is within modern (and let's be honest, wealthy white able-bodied American) standards, then you are denying yourself and others a huge amount of representation and seriously limiting the media around you.
I wouldn't say Ted Lasso did any of its abuse/abuse recovery narratives "well" but I do think they did parts of all of them like really well, which is what makes it all so incredibly frustrating. Like, showing how hard it can be to intervene by having the Diamond Dogs be avoidant and non-confrontational despite their mutual concern about Beard's relationship with Jane, but then having Higgins step up and say something anyway (and even though Beard didn't take his advice, it still felt like okay, this is a good, this is a realistic and messy and complicated narrative to tell that nevertheless highlights the importance of speaking up and being there for your friends even if it doesn't always work out how you'd planned), having Beard & Roy jump in to help Jamie at Wembley and Roy respond so well to Jamie's story in Amsterdam, humanizing Rupert in International Break and giving the backstory for why Rebecca fell in love with him and offering them a moment of real connection again without once pushing the narrative that he should be forgiven or that Rebecca even considers for a second taking him back...all that shit was GOOD!!! it was really nuanced and complex and good!! andddd then it ended with the BeardJane wedding, a James Tartt Sr. forgiveness agenda and Rupert morphing immediately into an over-the-top cartoon villain like what 😭 they had the capacity...and yet!!! nooooooo.
yall know the whole study about the rats with cocaine? how putting them in a more comfort based environment with all their natural necessities they were less likely to use the cocaine? and that if they did use the cocaine, they nearly never got addicted??
well, im watching this fantastic youtube video on how the “quit vaping” ad campaigns actually want kids to vape - whole conspiracy theory essay thing… anyways it goes on to say talk about the ‘war on drugs’ ads and that got me thinking big time.
why is it that we havent started funding and producing and infrastructure and system in order to provide everyone with all their basic needs as a way to “win” the ‘war on drugs’?????
like a sustainable community thats designed with the individual in mind????? i know thats somewhat common in europe
just seems like capitalism, in its current form, with the democratic-republic we have is built to sustain something like that!? so why hasnt our communities come together as a whole in support of something that aids everyone!!!???
[Immediately after Fit brutally roasted a chatter for being a filthy metagamer]
Dono: You became my comfort streamer. It has been great here.
Fit: Oh, thank you so much, thank you thank you thank you. I'm glad I can bring you comfort when I insult the sht out of some chatters, I'm glad I can comfort you. That's right!
Fit: People say I'm nice, no, I'm not nice. I'm polite. Mostly. There's a difference between being nice and being polite, I am polite. I am polite.
In wake of the stupid shitshow that is this dumb coronation, I saw someone going 'oh protests are illegal in the UK? Ireland we've got to get you out of there' and I've seen a lot of other stuff to that effect of 'oh poor Wales', or 'get out of there Scotland' (from people outside the UK) and like!!! people in England are also suffering this impacts people in England!
I agree and fully support all kinds of independence for the other countries in this shitshow of a nation- do not twist my words with this one, I support independence, and when I see folks from those countries only talking about this, obviously I support them because their primary concern is independence.
But!! It's fucking infuriating to see people from outside the UK acting like the other countries just have to get out of the UK and then no more innocent people will suffer, as if that's the only problem, as if there aren't plenty of people in England who don't deserve this nonsense either