#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-“ no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachinesims]

The 10 Baby Challenge

This challenge serves as a sort of combination of the 100 baby challenge and the Supersim challenge. It requires the use of MCCC.

Lifespans can be set to short or normal, but not long. Seasons can be whatever length you like.

Your sim is a young adult with the Serial Romantic aspiration to start. At the beginning this is your only aspiration, but after you complete it you are free to jump around back and forth mid-aspiration at your whim.

You’ll be doing a lot of aspirations on this sim because they could theoretically live forever.

All other sims will age as they would normally, except for your sim. Use MCCC to flag them to never age. It is up to you whether to also flag them as immortal, or whether to play the challenge on dangerous mode (I like to live dangerously).

Your sim can become pregnant, but almost as if to protect the species from their longevity causing too much homogenizing of the gene pool, they have reduced fertility. Set “risky woohoo” to 2%. You can also set “try for baby” to 2% if you like, or you can just make sure to never use that interaction with your sim.

After they complete the serial romantic aspiration, they can invite their partner(s) and any future partners and anyone else they’d like to live with them, and they can even get married, but they don’t usually bother unless someone really strikes their fancy. AND - there always has to be room in the house for a possible baby. So the house can have 1-6 other slots taken up by who/whatever you want. A pet. A servo. A kid. A multi-generational house. A harem anime plot. But always room for a baby. And of course your sim is always free to live alone.

All of their woohoo partners have a risk of getting them pregnant. You can decide whether you want to do this through MCCC or cas.fulleditmode

The point isn’t to get to 10 babies as fast as you absolutely can. That would get very tedious very fast.

The point is too see how many skills/aspirations/careers/degrees/groups/features, especially those you don’t usually play, you can finish before the tenth baby is born.

Your sim has other things they want in life. They don’t use contraception because their fertility is already so low, but they love a roll in the sack. Or shower. Or rocketship. Or dumpster.

Your sim isn’t family oriented. They might or might not hate children; that part is up to you. They are not loyal. I would play a doting fae who desperately wants children she can rarely conceive, but you could play an impartial god who barely cares her children exist, or a negligent hedonist, or whatever. It’s your game. The point is: the babies serve as a stopwatch, not a scoring device, though your sim does have to raise them to young adulthood without dying.

Your sim is romantic. So there are certain times your sim is always going to want to woohoo. If one of their romantic interests invites them out to a festival or on a date, they are going to want to go, and they are going to want to woohoo. If they get want to kiss/woohoo/go on a date with/or get engaged to a specific sim, your sim wants to woohoo. Your sim is going to woohoo like a bunny, even when you kind of just want to keep building robots.

Speaking of robots… and scientists… you may set it so your sim can become pregnant through alien abduction, but unless you dramatically lower the rate of abduction pregnancies or abductions, only the babies from the first two alien pregnancies count toward the ten baby total. This is especially true if your sim joins the scientist career.

No cheating motives, aspirations, careers, etc. And obviously no cheating pregnancies. Your sim only conceives naturally. (They are free to adopt children, but they do not count to the total.) Game exploits that do not require cheating are allowed, however, like using trait points. It is up to whether you want to play extra challenge mode with no fertility traits/buffs or make it through a little quicker by upping your odds.

Just kidding, cheat whatever you want. It’s your game!

After the final baby is born, you can post your sim’s final family tree and info panel showing what skills and traits they’ve got, etc. But more importantly than that, in the long gaps between babies, you can try doing stuff you don’t usually do in the game. Master DJing, or bring a ghost back from the dead, or join a weird career, or whatever. Finish collections you never bother collecting or take up hobbies you never give your sims.

Note that I haven’t playtested this, so it might be wildly unbalanced. I have no idea how long getting to ten babies with this method would actually take in game and whether it’s way too long or way too short. If risky woohoo percents need to be raised a bit, or baby count needs to be lowered, or whatever, do that to make it fun!

Especially at the end would be fun to check the sims stats panel that shows how many times they woohoo’d. We could do an entirely RNG based speedrun - who can get the best woohoo to baby ratio? Who gets the worst? It’s like shiny hunting. And since lovers keep dying off, you’ll have to keep romancing new sims to keep playing.

#timemachine wuz here #the sims 4 #sorry if this has been done before #the 10 baby challenge #sims 4 challenge #sims 4 10 baby challenge #the sims

[timemachineyeah]

the current electoral system is an unfairly weighted corrupt mess that will not save us, but

abstaining from voting does nothing to destabilize or replace it

participation can reduce harm and be strategically applied to your larger more revolutionary goals

(plus following electoral politics just keeps you aware of what specifically to expect from The Powers you oppose)

there is no materially revolutionary argument against voting if you are at all able.

#ESPECIALLY in local elections #timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

Keep seeing posts in solidarity with the WGA strike that say things like “no one cares about your favorite shows” and “fuck your tv show. I hope it gets canceled” and while I understand and agree with the underlying sentiment, which is clearly “Real people are more important than fictional ones, you dipshit” I don’t like the framing because, well, it feels shitty to dismiss the importance of the work made by the workers we’re trying to defend.

No one cares about your favorite shows more than the writers do.

No one understands the power and importance of tv and film more than the writers who created them.

No one loves tv, movies, games, and stories more than the people who fought tooth and nail in an incredibly competitive and underpaid profession for the chance to be part of it.

They know it’s important. They know it changes lives. They know it can be more than just a story, more than just a bit of entertainment. They’ve loved and respected this medium, continue to love and respect this medium, more than you ever will.

The person who wants a show to get canceled the least is the writer who poured their everything into making it good.

TV and movies are great, actually, and you are not wrong to be invested and care about them. That’s what the writers gave you. That’s what the writers wanted when they wrote it. That’s why they wrote it.

Which is why we respect them when they make the call that this strike and its demands are worth risking it.

The people on that picket line do not want their shows canceled. They want to keep writing them. They can’t, not under the current conditions.

So we accept the risk with them and support them.

But I don’t want to berate the power and importance of their work, the value they put into it and the love they have for it, in the same breath that I am defending their strike. Worthy shows will likely get canceled or derailed and that will be a tragedy worth mourning. The writers know that better than anyone.

So when they say something else is even more important, we listen. And when your favorite show gets ruined, you make sure your fully justified anger and grief is pointed in the right direction - at the CEOs who killed it.

#timemachine wuz here #wga strike #i stand with the wga

[timemachineyeah]

thinking about how old umbrellas are

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

Where have all the good men gone, and where are all the gods?

To catch them is my real test, to train them is my cause

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

I think the thing that drives me the most batshit about the medical fatphobia conversation is that the burden of proof feels so exactly backwards. Just from an obvious best practices standpoint???

Things like intentional malnourishment, intentionally incapacitating vital organs through surgery, denial of potentially lifesaving medical care until those things are done, etc.

Those are all pretty extreme. The kinds of things it feels like a “first do no harm” system should have a lot of solid evidence for before recommending or implementing them.

But they’re so bog standard and accepted and everyone from doctors to your own family will look at you like you’re a flat-earther when you suggest maybe we shouldn’t be defaulting to that.

#timemachine wuz here #fatphobia

[timemachineyeah]

Takarazuka Revue is so funny because it’s like we are a fine upstanding institution of good family values, like homophobia. Please ignore the lesbians making up the majority of people both on stage and in the audience.

Takarazuka Revue is like: we enforce only the strictest gender roles in our troupe as is right and proper, sorting them into the two genders: women who are women, and women who are men. How dare you suggest there’s anything queer about that.

Takarazuka Revue is simultaneously the queerest thing and the least queer thing to ever exist. Takarazuka bucks tradition and is tradition incarnate. Takarazuka is like

and then is like, “no homo”

and maintains itself as one of the most hierarchical artistic organizations in the world with intense control over its performers. This alternate reality where the talented (and lucky, and connected) few can gain the right to openly perform queerness in the one setting comphet capitalism has carved out for them as long as they follow a different even stricter set of rules for dress and behavior. It dissembles traditional gender by its very existence and so must reinforce it at every turn.

And yet despite being the product of a conservative capitalist railroad owner who only really sought to exploit women for entertainment aimed at men (and their hetero families) that remains loyal to those deeply normative puritanical roots, it was and is also one of the most liberating theater and media experiences of queer Japanese people for decades. You can tell from all the queer art about it, by queer people. By the fact that the audience who flocked to it were not (cis) men.

Trying to untangle the mutual influence of shoujo manga to takarazuka is even more difficult that trying to untangle something like the history of modern Broadway and Disney movies. We wouldn’t have The Little Mermaid without Little Shop of Horrors, but we wouldn’t have Wicked without the Disney renaissance, but we wouldn’t have Frozen without Wicked, and going back further to things like Cinderella and Rogers and Hammerstein and they are intertwined but listen to me. Takarazuka and shoujo manga, especially yuri, are more intertwined. And then so much western media has been inspired by shoujo anime. Rose of Versailles the manga was inspired by Takarazuka and then in turn was adapted into their most famous play which then in turn influenced so many more artworks. Uranus and Neptune are an otokoyaku and musumeyaku. Utena and Anthy (and honestly that whole ass show. The stairs?? C’mon). And all the works and creators THOSE works inspired.

We owe so much to Takarazuka but also if we tried to thank them for their role in queer history they’d be like “we’ve never been queer in our lives!!!!!!!!” and then say a slur to your face while taking your money. Incredible. Wish more people knew what the fuck it was and I could get fansubs.

#timemachine wuz here #takarazuka

[timemachineyeah]

(Source)

#timemachine wuz here #twitter #fat acceptance

[timemachineyeah]

Loving yourself isn’t a reward for good behavior, it’s just something that makes life nicer

Hating yourself isn’t an apology for bad behavior, it’s just something that makes life worse

Suffering isn’t a virtue, so you can’t cite it as a reason someone is justified or superior

Pleasure isn’t a sin, so you can’t cite it as a reason someone is unjustified or inferior

Just because something took a lot of discipline isn’t a meaningful defense of it

Just because something was easy isn’t a meaningful criticism

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

“too bad the creator is [bad]” okay but when you say that is it “JKR is transphobic” levels of understatement or is it “Rebecca Sugar is a nazi apologist” levels of garbage from someone’s mind McMansion

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

A Sign of Affection is interesting for being maybe the only anime I’ve ever seen be explicit that every non-natural hair color you see is a dye job. Our pink haired protagonist has brown hair in flashbacks. Our silver-haired love interest’s roots grow out. It’s not plot relevant or anything, but the story still goes out of its way to be like “btw off screen the characters are putting in a lot of work to look like this”.

#timemachine wuz here #a sign of affection

[timemachineyeah]

So I go to a weekly pub quiz called Geeks Who Drink - it's a national standardized quiz, there's probably one near you if you live in the US. It's a fun time.

Anyway, sometimes it's clear the writers of the quiz are on some kick, like if you go every week you'll see trends among the questions that are asked and think, "didn't we just have a different question on this same topic?", like maybe the writers are really into the Golden Girls or whatever lately.

And the past couple months, I think the writers of the quiz have been trying to radicalize us, because we keep getting questions about the CIA. Like we had to anagram Cointelpro a few weeks back. Last night one of the answers was MKUltra. The questions are like "When the CIA did [TERRIBLE THING], what was that called?" and you can tell the question writer is just like "DID YOU KNOW THE CIA DID THIS? I AM SEEDING THIS INFORMATION TO YOU. THIS IS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE. HOW FUCKED UP IS THAT?" like yes, thank you, Geeks Who Drink. I did in fact know and it's getting me lots of quiz points. But I am seeing other people in this bar and restaurant who didn't know, so good job! It's working! Keep it up!

#timemachine wuz here

[timemachineyeah]

I really doubt Julie and the Phantoms is coming back for another season at this point, but the sudden rumors about it again is making me maybe need to rewatch it for the zillionth time

#timemachine wuz here #julie and the phantoms #jatp #a sequel concept album ISN’T out of the cards tho imo

[timemachineyeah]

We talk a lot about many of the hard parts of writing but one hard part we don’t talk about enough is how you lose your ability to be normal for maybe months at a time because your brain is thinking constantly in hyper detail about something no one else knows anything about

#timemachine wuz here #cleaning out my drafts