The Absurd Hero’s Journey

Byrrn - early 30s - he/him or it/its - Icon by nyxisart

[onedudesview]

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

[arson-and-rust]

I don’t want to make more rice today, I don’t have a lot in the tank & would prefer not to leave the house. But my dinner options are curtailed by lack of rice. What’s a bitch to do

[arson-and-rust]

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[deepinourengines]

unclean = adj. of or pertaining to uncles

[arson-and-rust]

So I don’t think this is happening just yet but uh, interesting that this med that we’re trying out has a chance of Going Wrong with ADHDers and possibly resulting in mania to the extent of hallucinations.

Interesting that we’re on night two of Some Damn Insomnia.

The first night it worked fine and I got sleepy why is it not doing the thing anymore 😭

[tmbgareok]

[arson-and-rust]

Go to bed? Nah. I want to stay up past 1am and use up all my phone screen time and be TIRED tomorrow! 😈😭

[melodies-stereo]

dont call things 'schizo'

[clowngirlcreampie]

youre not "schizoposting" you're just saying some weird shit and being sanist about it

[melodies-stereo]

people will disavow the R slur up and down but turn right around and refer to something as 'schizo' and not think anything of it. develop some actual principles and stop using sanist language

[rubysapphrald]

i didn’t know perez hilton was a stage name that he purposefully modelled after paris hilton’s real name i thought she just organically had an evil gay wario or something

[subplotsideshow]

A trans person will simply exist in the same building as a child, and conservatives will make a scene about how "inappropriate" and "indecent" it is. But a children's author will upskirt a trans woman and post said photo to her 14 million followers on social media, a significant number of whom are most likely children, and suddenly conservatives don't seem to care about appropriateness and decency. It's almost like they never cared about the children in the first place. Weird...

[angelbabymikaa]

saw an article about an AI startup trying to make drones that would obliterate mosquitos and it literally made me cry like that 4 million dollars they spent could have gone into malaria and yellow fever research or spreading money to areas where they need nets and healthcare due to mosquitos like the answer isn’t killing an entire species from the planet it would destroy ecosystems and leave massive holes in the food chain for birds and other animals not even considering that mosquitoes are pollinators themselves like i truly feel like one company should not have the ability to literally just decide if a species should no longer exist and then execute an entire population like that like i feel like we should have a fucking say 😭

[miss-mossball]

30 days of your OC Challenge!

I wanted to make a set of OC prompts that's a bit unique, so I came up with 30 loose ideas and compositions to draw/get drawn of your OC! :D

It doesn't have to take 30 days, in fact you could easily use this as an ask game prompt if you want, or even ideas to take to your favorite local commissions artist to do for you :> Just 30 little ideas to appreciate an OC of yours!

~If you like my art, please consider supporting me on Kofi~

and please try not to repost, I have it up on Blusky too

[sophie-frm-mars]

country where most people vote left wing most of the time for 100 years and still the home counties get everything they want forever

[sophie-frm-mars]

If you don't understand the UK at all, please start by looking at the big round outcropping of the map that contains Clacton-on-Sea (Farage's constituency), King's Lynn, Southend-on-Sea. This part is just insanely racist and almost entirely farmers and old people who have retired to the beach. It is the Florida of the UK

Then look to the west from there and you'll see the area between Oxford and Cambridge. I hope you've heard of Oxbridge before, we use that portmanteau because almost every British Prime Minister (and broadly British politicians actually throughout history) went to either Oxford or Cambridge. The area around London there, but not London itself are characterised by being 1. very very very white 2. very very very conservative and 3. representing some kind of core "englishness" which is why they're called the "home counties". These people have had a chokehold on what happens in the UK for hundreds of years and for a couple of hundred years there they had a pretty strong say in what happened to essentially the whole planet.

When yankees talk about "British people" but are clearly referring to English people from one of these two areas, it drives me absolutely fucking insane. Even if you just said "English" instead of "British" it would be a massively ignorant thing to say, but it would be so much better than generalising the attitudes and politics of these areas onto, for example, Northern Ireland, a literal occupied territory oppressed by precisely these people. Please start directing your hatred appropriately toward the English and specifically the southern English.

Footnote: Everything southwest of the second map is also historically occupied territory and the further into Cornwall you get the more you will meet people who historically wouldn't call themselves English. If you die without a will in Cornwall all of your belongings default to ownership of the Crown, because again, it is an occupied territory.

[sophie-frm-mars]

Okay yankees thank you for coming with me on the magical mystery tour of why you need to hate the English and specifically the Southern English, it's time to talk about the North.

So here we have Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and York, five of the most populous cities in the UK. Those together are well over (about twice) the populations of Edinburgh and Glasgow put together. This area contains some of the most shocking natural beauty in the country and also was relentlessly targeted by capitalists for internal colonisation and industrialisation within Britain in the 18th & 19th Centuries.

Workers from this area and from each of these cities have at various times throughout British history been massacred by people from the South in a centuries-long conquest that establishes the South as the UK's centre of power and the North as the UK's generator of power (I mean this quite literally because factories, power plants and coal mines are all quite notoriously concentrated in the North). These bouts of open violence by the Southerners are just the visible eruption of physical violence against the North, usually against workers' uprisings, but are part of a slow burning eternal obliteration of the Northern working class.

The area I've shown is the most commonly agreed conception of what "The North" is, but because this socioeconomic history defines what people understand the North to be some people will feel intuitively that Birmingham, which is firmly in the Midlands, is part of the North as well. The uniting political reality of the North is being used for other people's political ambitions with no real voice whatsoever. This is why Andy Burnham former Mayor of Manchester becoming PM tomorrow is supposed to be a big deal, because he's promising a devolution of power from London, but we'll have to see if that really happens at all.

If you want to understand the tension between London and the rest of the UK but especially the North, this map of Gross Regional Product is pretty useful. You'll notice that they have included two colours on this map that are just for London. This is because, and I cannot stress this enough, London is completely unlike the rest of the country in basically every way.

Firstly, London is huge. If you add up all the other cities I just mentioned above, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh, you would have roughly half the population of London. Secondly, London is rich and horribly unequal. If you look at the table above, you will see that GRP per capita for inner West London is over five times the national average. Bear in mind that average is divided by such an enormously higher population than other regions, AND that most of the people living in London are still poor as hell. That should give you a picture of how unequal London is.

But this is actually a much better picture of how unequal London is:

Grenfell tower, where a fire killed 72 people, is in the Royal Borough of Chelsea & Kensington which also contains: Kensington Palace, Lords Cricket Grounds, Notting Hill (from the Hugh Grant film Notting Hill), and Westfield London.

The Grenfell fire, a product of unsafe cladding that wasn't replaced despite being flagged as dangerous because the landlord didn't want to spend money, is a perfect demonstration of London's inequality because in the same borough as all these obscene displays of wealth dozens of working class black and brown people burned to death because their safety was too expensive. There are tonnes of towers around the UK that still have the same kind of cladding by the way, and since the fire the number of MPs who are also landlords has consistently gone up and up and up.

But Sophie you're talking about London, I thought you said we needed to talk about the North! Great point reader, thanks, but to understand the North and moreover understand which British people are deserving of international loathing and capital punishment for crimes against humanity we have to understand London. I hope it's obvious enough to point out why the Scottish, Welsh and Irish in particular don't deserve to be lumped in with the English, but within England there is a stark divide between the realities of people whose families have been in the working poor or the monied gentry for generations and generations, and that divide is mostly regional. In the North there is extreme deprivation, in the home counties there are a tonne of rich white people who make horrible decisions on behalf of millions, and in London there are both.

[cuppydogshane]

all the rights that come with marriage you should be able to have without marriage btw. you should be able to designate a person who can visit you in the hospital regardless of your relationship to that person.

[fucko]

[cryptotheism]

What is this deranged school of guacamole production that makes the avocado thin and watery but goes hard on the jalapeno; seeds aplenty. Why is the dominant flavor the pepper. It's fucking guacamole. If I wanted salsa verde I would have purchased salsa verde, but no I am forced to suffer through this wet and fatless tomato chunk nonsense. Guacamole "Authentico" my estrogenized ass.