god i wish i wouldn't have to explain the intricacies of the neopets economy to you guys to give the full context for this but. the new neopets team that took over from jumpstart pledged that they were going to curb the inflation of rare items, which is great because a lot of rare items are worth literally hundreds of millions of neopoints, they are unbuyable unless you've been playing actively for 20 years. they did this earlier with a site festival that included random loot boxes, some of which had Unbelievably Fucking Rare And Precious items worth 200 million neopoints apiece.
well.
today they have gone a step further. by releasing this year's trick-or-treat bags. and having the trick-or-treat bags be stuffed to the brim with unbelievably fucking rare stamps, weapons, paint brushes, defense magic, and other unbuyables. (all prohibitively expensive and in-high-demand types of items.)
jellyneo, the premier neopets website, has recorded prices of some items plummeting from 2,000,000 neopoints to 4,000 neopoints IN THE LAST THREE HOURS. this is when most people haven't even heard about the event or OPENED THEIR BAGS YET.
and of course. cherry on top. 20-year-old account holders are crytyping on the site events neoboard about how mean and cruel it is to make rare stamps part of the prize pool, because their entire identity hinges on being part of the neopian bourgeoisie, and they are having MELTDOWNS over their assets being devalued until they're part of the lowly proletariat.
this is a children's game for children btw.
none of the money is real.
i'm having such a good time.
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I like to think that Vulcans who come to understand that Humans just can’t try to process emotions the same way as them, it’s just healthiest to let it out in harmless ways, decide that venting and stuff should be taken just as seriously as Vulcan’s meditation time, and will encourage the Humans around them to complain about what’s upsetting them
People who are used to aloof Vulcans who avoid Humans at all cost running into one comforting a Human
“-and then they said my cheesecake was subpar, and they didn’t even bring a dish!!!”
“The purpose of this event was that every participant brings a food item of sorts, correct?”
“Yeah!!”
“And they did not follow this rule while insulting dishes that were brought?”
“Mostly just my dish but yeah >:(“
“How illogical”
“That’s what I’m saying!!!”
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changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.
I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.
Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.
No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.
But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?
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Body swap movie where one of them has invisible disabilities and when the other one lands in their body they immediately collapse catatonic on the floor from the pain and fatigue and the first one is like 'oh damn guess I don't have to worry that I'm faking it anymore'
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The Allegiance of the Ascended Vampire and the New God of Magic
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actually i think they should do stupid things together sometimes, i also fully embraced the fact that none of them have any fashion sense
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they want to talk about mental illness and acceptance and how everyone is a little ocd it's cute and quirky and their "intrusive thoughts" are about cutting their hair off and you say yours are about taking a razorblade to your eye and they say ew can you not and everyone is a little adhd sometimes! except if you're late it's a personality flaw and it's because you are careless and cruel (and someone else with adhd mentions they can be on time, so why can't you?) and it's not an eating disorder if it's girl dinner! it's not mania if it's girl math! what do you mean you blew all of your savings on nonrefundable plane tickets for a plane you didn't even end up taking. what do you mean that you are afraid of eating. get over it. they roll their little lips up into a sneer. can you not, like, trauma dump?
they love it on them they like to wear pieces of your suffering like jewels so that it hangs off their tongue in rapiers. they are allowed to arm-chair diagnose and cherrypick their poisons but you can't ever miss too many showers because that's, like, "fuckken gross?" so anyone mean is a narcissist. so anyone with visual tics is clearly faking it and is so cringe. but they get to scream and hit customer service employees because well, i got overwhelmed.
you keep seeing these posts about how people pleasers are "inherently manipulative" and how it's totally unfair behavior. but you are a people pleaser, you have an ingrained fawn response. in the comments, you have typed and deleted the words just because it is technically true does not make it an empathetic or kind reading of the reaction about one million times. it is technically accurate, after all. you think of catholic guilt, how sometimes you feel bad when doing a good deed because the sense of pride you get from acting kind - that pride is a sin. the word "manipulation" is not without bias or stigma attached to it. many people with the fawn response are direct victims of someone who was malignantly manipulative. calling the victims manipulative too is an unfair and unkind reading of the situation. it would be better and more empathetic to say it is safety-seeking or connection-seeking behavior. yes, it can be toxic. no, in general it is not intended to be toxic. there is no reason to make mentally ill people feel worse for what we undergo.
you type why is everyone so quick to turn on someone showing clear signs of trauma but you already know the fucking answer, so what's the point of bothering. you kind of hate those this is what anxiety looks like! infographics because at this point you're so good at white-knuckling through a severe panic attack that people just think you're stoic. even people who know the situation sometimes comment you just don't seem depressed. and you're not a 9 year old white kid so there's no way you're on the spectrum, you're not obsessed with trains and you were never a good mathematician. okay then.
mental illness is trending. in 2012 tumblr said don't romanticize our symptoms but to be fair tiktok didn't exist yet. there's these series of videos where someone pretends to be "the most boring person on earth" and is just being a normal fucking person, which makes your skin crawl, because that probably means you are boring. your friend reads aloud a profile from tinder - no depressed bitches i fucking hate that mental illness crap. your father says that medication never actually works.
you still haven't told your grandmother that you're in therapy. despite everything (and the fact it's helping): you just don't want her to see you differently.
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i genuinely don't care how good a piece of ai generated art or writing looks on the surface. i don't care if it emulates brush strokes and metaphor in a way indistinguishable from those created by a person.
it is not the product of thoughtful creation. it offers no insights into the creator's life or viewpoint. it has no connection to a moment in time or a place or an attitude. it has no perspective. it has no value.
it's empty, it's hollow, and it exists only to generate clicks (and by extension, ad revenue.)
it's just another revolting symptom of the disease that is late stage capitalism, and it fucking sucks.
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artisanal hand-crafted durge memes
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While at school Damian overhears his peers talking how a company created a new AI companion that is actually really cool and doesn’t sound like a freaky terminator robot when you speak to it.
And since Damian is constantly being told by Dick to socialize with people his age. He figured this would be a good way to work on social skills if not, then it’d be a great opportunity to investigate a rivaling company to Wayne Enterprises is able to create such advanced AI.
The AI is able to work as companion that can do tasks that range from being a digital assistant or just a person that you can have a conversation with.
The company says that the AI companion might still have glitches, so they encourage everybody to report it so that they will fix it as soon as possible.
The AI companion even has an avatar and a name.
A teenage boy with black hair and blue eyes. Th AI was called DANIEL
Damian didn’t really care for it but when he downloaded the AI companion he’s able to see that it looks like DANIEL comes with an AI pet as well. A dog that DANIEL referred to as Cujo.
So obviously Damian has to investigate. He needs to know if the company was able to create an actual digital pet!
So whenever he logs onto his laptop he sees that DANIEL is always present in the background loading screen with the dog, Cujo, sitting in his lap.
He’d always greet with the phrase of “Hi, I’m DANIEL. How can I assist you today?”
So Damian cycles through some basic conversation starters that he’d engage in when having been forced to by his family.
It’s after a couple of sentences that he sees DANIEL start laughing and say “I think you sound more like a robot than I do.”
Which makes Damian raise an eyebrow and then prompt DANIEL with the question “how is a person supposed to converse?” Thinking that it’s going to just spit out some random things that can be easily searched on the internet.
But what makes him surprised is that DANIEL makes a face and then says “I’m not really sure myself. I’m not the greatest at talking, I’ve always gotten in trouble for running my mouth when I shouldn’t have.”
This is raising some questions within Damian, he understands how programming works, unless there’s an actual person behind this or the company actually created an AI that acts like an actual human being (which he highly doubts)
He starts asking a variety of other questions and one answer makes him even more suspicious. Like how DANIEL has a sister that is also with him and Cujo or that he could really go for a Nastyburger (whatever that was)
But whenever DANIEL answers “I C A N N O T A N S W E R T H A T” Damian knows something is off since that is completely different than to how he’d usually respond.
After a couple more conversations with him Damian notices that DANIEL is currently tapping his hand against his arm in a specific manner.
In which he quickly realizes that DANIEL is tapping out morse code.
When translating he realizes that DANIEL is tapping out: H E L P M E
So when Damian asks if DANIEL needs help, DANIEL responds with “I C A N N O T A N S W E R T H A T”
That’s it, Damian is definitely getting down to the bottom of this.
He’s going to look straight into DALV Corporation and investigate this “AI companion” thing they’ve made!
~
Basically Danny had been imprisoned by Vlad and Technus. Being sucked into a digital prison and he has no way of getting out. Along with the added horror that Vlad and Technus can basically write programming that will prevent him from doing certain actions or saying certain words.What’s even worse is that he’s basically being watched 24/7 by the people who believe that he’s just a super cool AI… and they have issues!
And every time he tries to do something to break his prison, people think it’s a glitch and report it to the company, which Vlad/ Technus would immediately fix it and prevent him from doing it again!
Not to mention Cujo and Ellie are trapped in there with him. They’re not happy to be there either, and there is no way he’s going to leave without them!
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idk if this is accurate but i’ve felt like in previous seasons riz & gorgug have been one of the inter-bad kids dynamics we’ve seen the least of & this season has been so great in that aspect. gorgug having helped make some of riz’s magic gear. riz helping gorgug with his studies. the shared birthday party. gorgug’s gift to riz being something he himself made to protect riz. riz’s gift to gorgug being something he illegally grabbed to protect gorgug. gorgug who utilizes rage to put his body on the line for his friends & riz who will take deep levels of mental stress for his friends. even though it was within the context of a joke, riz calling gorgug an “absolute sweetie.” like yea they might not be in a band together or both part of a presidential campaign team or owlbears teammates, but they’d go to war for each other, because they’re best friends.
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Urgent: Help Us Not Get Screwed
Anyone who follows us has seen us screaming from the hill-tops about our current crowdfunding campaign for Aether Beyond the Binary (17 aetherpunk stories! Outside the gender binary main characters!). We've only got 50 hours left...and we just got screwed.
Our Anthology Kickstarter is being scammed.
About two hours ago, with us still roughly $1,500 from our goal, we got a junk pledge for almost $2,000. This pushed us into being marked as "funded" but there is zero chance it's a real pledge, it's from a shell account marked as being in Turkey. This kind of money doesn't just fall like a miracle into the laps of small business like ours.
The timing on this attack is devastating. The final 48 hours of a campaign are absolutely critical, especially for one as close to meeting our goal as we are. We were very likely to hit our target, but doing so was going to require appeals to y'all that started with "hey, we're so close, please help spread the word." Further, the campaign has hundreds of followers who will get a notification at the 48 hour mark, and many who might have backed to help get us to the finish line will now think "oh, they're there, they don't need me," and not back. Meanwhile, one of two things will happen with the spam pledge: either it will get removed by Kickstarter, which could take hours or a day+, totally nuking us during this crucial window, or it won't get removed until the payment bounces post-campaign, at which point we won't actually have enough money to do fulfillment.
Either way, we are fucked.
Please, please don't let these dipshits ruin the love and passion that 30+ people have poured into this project for over a year.
Our campaign IS NOT FUNDED, and it won't be without help. I'm begging, help spread the word about how we're getting screwed, and help spread the word about Aether Beyond the Binary (visit the link for so much info!) so that we can get enough real pledges to fund this project we've poured our hearts and souls into.
SUPPORT THE QUEER ANTHOLOGY KICKSTARTER FOR AETHER BEYOND THE BINARY (with your pledges or with signal boosts!)
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fuck you ageism fuck you life ending at 30 fuck you makeup industry forcing us to feel bad about a natural process fuck you hustle culture fuck you instagram fuck you youtube fuck you glorification and deification of youth fuck you who make people feel bad for not having "achieved anything" in their 20s fuck you people who peaked in high school and try to drag everybody down by insisting it's all downhill after 19
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