The correct answer is telling your asshole relatives that they need to do a match with the mini-goliath themselves if they think they’re so tough. Then they either have to play along with the bit or else they’re the asshole who hurt a child’s feelings. (Spoilers if they’re like my family: they will, but then you and the lil bro can bond over that shared trauma. Ah, family!)

In Daoism, you don’t necessarily even care about “happiness” as that’s a quality internal to oneself. It is understood though that all things have a Way (a dao) which they ideally align with. Being at odds with your dao causes strife.

So a fish, swimming in the water “like it’s supposed to be,” can be thought of as happy because it is living it’s Dao. Zhuangzi perhaps interprets the “how/where do you know” question as bad form on his friends part. Daoists often dismiss a lot of learned knowledge as obfuscsting one from the dao (a principle I don’t fully agree with the old masters on) so trying to dig deeper into the question “but how can you know what a fish thinks?!” is missing the point entirely. Fish are “happy” because, as animals, they naturally live in accordance with Dao.

Cops. No one knows why.

One theory is ACAB = 1312 = All Cops Are Bad, so shortened to 12 (why not 13? also the slang predates “acab” popularity.)

Another is the show Adam-12, about cops.

They could make peace (aka Johnson could shut up and choke down some orange D) but I don’t see Trump and our truculant Speaker really getting along well. Johnson is a principled corrupt shitbag, an actual Christian nationalist, while Trump just uses Xian nationalism as a prop.

Terrible news, Shell better put back all that carbon they weren’t supposed to release!

I mean, Jaquim Phoenix’s Joker did… what? Kill Jay Leno on air? Luigi is definitely in the top 3 Jokers, way above Leto and Phoenix.

Because the ruling class is terrified

I especially like how the only example photo (from a fucking tweet of course) shows the completely flat non-ass of some anime goth girl that looks like she’s 14. We need to go back to making gamers ashamed of their hobby.

Millenial here, I had an existential crisis in my mid to late 20s because the job market was shit, my romantic relationships were in shambles, and prospects for the future looked grim. I managed to shake myself out of it and find a path forward after moving and changing a lot of my expectations for how life should be. I realized that I’d been lied to my entire life about what was important and how to achieve it. I realized that I was struggling so hard because the path laid out for you is one that benefits owners and rulers, not yourself.

Nothing in America has gotten better since then, and all those factors are worse. Jobs are less stable, less interesting, and lower paying. Relationships are even more alienated and hard to form. The future looks totally fucked.

I wouldn’t call it a midlife crisis, but I had another big breakdown in early 2020 as I realized that the pandemic response was indicative of how we were collectively going to handle all the other issues of the 21st century: climate-change-enhanced disasters, wars, famines, and plagues. All my faith that humanity could pull together in crisis to handle the looming apocalyptic challenges evaporated from seeing people hoarde toilet paper and cheer on mass death from avoidable disease.

So now I’m just trying to enjoy the downfall. Either I’m wrong and the hateful, spiteful, shitty people are correct in which case I guess there’s nothing to worry about. Or I’m right, people suck, and I’m privledged to have been born at the very peak of human progress before the whole species dies back to the low fuedal periods, if not extinction. Might as well enjoy the ride!

Maybe he’s developing his mental powers?

Is there an ARPG that doesn’t have some former D1 or D2 staff member on it? I’m sure the old janitors from Blizz North had to end up somewhere too.

Yessongs is so freaking good. Great on vinyl and pretty easy to find too!

I find this edit even more upsetting. Right wingers love to post the dumbest shit with this emoji as if being arrogantly stupid somehow makes you less wrong.

Hmm, TM doesn’t have the prosthetic arm yet. I wonder if the intended use for this armor doesn’t result in some unexpected costs…

J

This was also my understanding and I begrudgingly agree with NDT that borders and states and tribalism are bad. I don’t agree with complaining about lines. Damn dude, sucks to have to be a regular participant in society, maybe of bureaucrats got paid better or there were more people working the passport desk.

Or… and i know this is fucking wild, he made up that story because in the US you get passports in the mail. Yeah, you have to maybe wait in a short line for some steps but overall you just send in your info and wait 6 weeks.

Eh, that’s one view. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow propose that the State arises from the intersection of three forms of social power. These are sovereignty (control of violence), bureaucracy (control of information), and politics (control through charisma and culture). Historicaly each of these has existed as the basis for societies alone and in combination without the concept of a state.

The State is a meme, a technology like religion or money, which provides a framework for the distribution and application of those 3 forms of power. It isn’t the only possible framework for that, but it’s outwardly destructive nature and self-propogation have ensured that the modern world is structured around a narrow set of configurations of the State.

It’s not some big gotcha: it’s unethical because consent is impossible to achieve. You have to have been alive for quite a number of years before you even have the cognition and experience to form an opinion about existing.

But that doesn’t just mean creating new beings is good because it’s impossible to consent. How would that apply to anything else?? By some logic (if you ignore obvious pain signals) animals can’t “tell” us they don’t consent to being butchered and eaten but that doesn’t make eating meat ethical either (I’m not vegan btw.) Having sex with an unconscious person is rape, because they can’t consent.

There may be suicidal animals who want to be eaten and there are certainly people who enjoy non-consensual sex and people who like being alive and believe their existence is a gift. The outcome still doesn’t excuse the act in these cases.

In all seriousness, visit your local library and ask them about it. Most library systems work with local authors to promote their work and regularly hold meetups and workshops for writers. Many cities have local zines, publishers, and anthologies. By getting to know your local writing scene, you can find opportunities to do readings of your work, have works published in collections, and so on.

I haven’t absorbed much about this release yet, but with talks of selling the company, and how massive a success elden ring is, and now this… I’m just saying, the signs are all there. ER is going to be FROMs Skyrim: so successful it destroys the good part of the company.