just an ass

[catchymemes]

[jagermortis-deactivated20200817]

welp. i was THISCLOSE to posting an adolescent “i hate everything” post… and then i saw this.

[eilti]

Literally just let this play 8 times in a row and my smile never faltered even once 😁

[takerfoxx]

WTF is an NTF? No matter how many times I’ve had it explained to me, it still makes no sense. The best I can figure that it’s a form of cryptocurrency with personalized artwork made on a really environmentally unfriendly material being sold for ridiculous prices just so suckers can get unique furry artz

[erinptah-admin]

Wwwwwelp, let me take a shot at it. *cracks knuckles*

Okay, so: you know how there are people who collect currency (the traditional, paper-and-coins type)?

And for some people, the specific thing they collect is “bills with unusual serial numbers”:

https://rarest.org/stuff/dollar-bills

So if you find a $1 bill with a serial number like “010101010″, a collector might be willing to pay $50 for that bill.

In general, currency is “fungible”, which just means interchangeable. If I loan you a $1 bill today, and you pay me back tomorrow with a different $1 bill, same difference, that’s an equal exchange.

But if you find a person who specifically thinks Bills With Weird Serial Numbers are a neat thing they like having – they’ll pay extra for the weird $1 bill. And they wouldn’t be willing to swap it for some other $1 bill with just any non-remarkable serial number. It is a Non-Fungible Bill.

…to the collector, anyway. Not to anybody else! You can’t take it to the grocery store and say “please give me $50 worth of groceries for this $1 bill because the serial number is interesting.”

(Although, hey…if you had a way to convince lots of people that (a) all of them should turn into collectors and (b) every single random serial number is a special one they should pay extra for…that sure would be a way to make a lot of money, huh?)

Non-Fungible Tokens are the same idea, but with cryptocurrency.

Bitcoins have ID numbers. (Same with any other crypto token – I’ll just use Bitcoin as our example here.) If you can find a collector who likes Bitcoins with weird ID numbers, maybe they’ll pay you 50 Bitcoin for it?

…okay, it turned out nobody cares about Bitcoin ID numbers for their own sake.

But! The ID can be used in a URL.

This is where the art comes in.

You upload an image to that URL. Then you tell people “look, if you buy this token from me, it’s like you’re buying the image! Art collections are fun and interesting, right? Someone give me 50 Bitcoins now.”

Note that the file doesn’t need to be personalized, or unique, or anything like that:

You can upload literally any file at that URL

You can upload someone else’s art

You could upload the same file to 20 different URLs, and sell 20 different NFTs of the same art

You could load the page for a token someone else owns, download the file, and directly re-upload it to the page for a token you own

The whole server could go down, and the URL from your token could be a 404 error for the rest of forever

So if you’re thinking “this sounds like a stupid deal that makes no sense” – you’re right! You are understanding the situation perfectly. This is total stupid nonsense. For the buyer.

For the person who owns some Bitcoins, and would like an easy way to turn them into even more Bitcoins? This is a fantastic racket.

Pay me a ton of tokens – or, preferably, the US$ equivalent of tons of tokens – for this single token I have! It’s totally actually worth that much, I promise.

Also, go ahead and Venmo me $50 for every random $1 bill in my wallet. This is a great deal for you.

And if you believe all that…I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Sidenote: the “environmentally unfriendly” part isn’t about material, it’s about energy. Producing and exchanging cryptocurrency takes an obscene amount of computing power, which uses an obscene amount of electricity. And it’s not a special thing about NFTs – it’s how all cryptocurrency works.

(A comparison I saw recently is, at the current rate, “people mining Bitcoin” for 1 day uses about the same amount of energy as “powering every commercial building in the United States” for 2 months.)

Sidenote 2: pretty sure the reason so much NFT art is ugly is, most of the Actual Artists have thought about it for 5 seconds and realized it’s a big racket. (Or been warned off it by other Actual Artists.) And the people who want to buy Actual Art are commissioning the artists directly, same as always.

So the people left in the NFT-buying scene are mostly people who…don’t care about the art quality at all. They just want in on the hype.

[trixxtersrat]

This is an absolutely amazing explanation! But it leaves me with another question, how does “mining” for cryptocurrency use more energy than normal internet use?

[erinptah-admin]

Whoo boy, let’s dive into this one…

Short answer: because it was designed that way. On purpose.

Long answer: for a currency to have any useful value, the amount and production has to be limited somehow.

(Which makes sense, right? If we tried to pay people in leaves, nobody would go to work for 15 leaves an hour, not when they could go for a hike and pick 15 leaves off the trees in 15 seconds.)

Precious metals – gold, silver, copper – have been popular for all of recorded history, because the limiting factor is “this material is physically difficult to dig out of the ground.”

With US dollars, the limit is part “bills are printed with complicated techniques that you need special equipment to pull off” and part “it’s illegal to for anyone except the government to print new dollars, and we will take you to jail if we catch you at it.”

With cryptocurrency, it’s all digital, so there’s no naturally-rare mineral involved. And it’s decentralized, so nobody has the authority to claim “we are the Bitcoin Police and we can take you to jail if you do this wrong.”

If you want it to work, you have to come up with some artificial limit, and then build that directly into the base code.

I’m not any kind of expert in the technical details here, so please nobody get too picky about it…but the general idea is, the blockchain will only spit out a new coin in response to a computer running calculations.

And for every new coin, it demands more calculations than the last one.

If you could still get a new Bitcoin by, say, “not using the internet for a day, have your computer use that power for mining instead,” then nobody would spend thousands of dollars to exchange for one Bitcoin, right? Anybody who wanted one would just take a day off Tumblr to mine it themselves.

Basically, there’s no reason to buy a Bitcoin for a dramatically higher price than it would cost you to mine a Bitcoin.

And the mining process keeps requiring more power, so:

First you can’t do it with just spare processing power from your main device, you need to buy a new one that’s fully dedicated to mining if you want to keep up

The extra power usage is enough to put a notable spike in your electric bill

One computer won’t do it anymore, you need two

Then four

Then eight

You have a warehouse full of computers

You have the electric bill that it takes to power a warehouse full of computers

Plus the storage rental costs of the warehouse space

The internet bill to keep all your computers in touch with the blockchain

The air-conditioning bill that it takes to keep the warehouse from just flat-out melting

Ongoing maintenance costs

Replacement parts

Not just any parts, you are buying up high-quality graphics cards and computer chips that can do the fastest processing

So much that it’s contributing to a global computer-chip shortage (this is not an exaggeration; Wall Street Journal source, Tech Republic source)

And the power demands are so high that defunct power plants are being re-activated to fill them (also not an exaggeration; Ars Technica source)

And the processing requirements just keep going up and up and up….

When the exchange rate for Bitcoin is at $10,000, that implies “the cost of the equipment, maintenance, and power bills to mint 1 Bitcoin is now so high that people would rather pay $10,000 cash than deal with it.”

…okay, this is a little oversimplified – there’s also gambling and speculating involved. Say, you think oil prices are about to go up, maybe you pay a little more than the current rate, figuring the power costs of mining are about to get more expensive and you’ll come out ahead. Or say Elon Musk said something mean about a coin you have, maybe you sell all your tokens for a lower price, figuring it’s better to get out now than wait for it to crash even farther.

But you can see how they’re generally connected. Nobody would pay around $10,000 if the production cost was around $10.

One more link (which explains some of the same things in different words, in case mine aren’t working for everyone):

Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “But The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?”

And, finally, let’s tie this back to NFTs:

Another thing you need for your currency to work: it has to be useful for something other than “gambling on the price.”

It can’t just be something you endlessly swap for other currencies and hope the exchange rate works in your favor! There have to be places that say “we will take this in exchange for Tangible Goods And Services.”

Bitcoin has this, at least a little bit. Most places aren’t lining up to accept it, but it’s been around long enough to build up some credibility, so there are a few.

If I started a new cryptocurrency tomorrow where the cost of mining the first token was $10K, nobody would bother. Because it has no credibility, no staying power, no way to ever convert that currency into actual stuff.

To be clear, people are launching new cryptocurrencies all the time.

Most of them aren’t even trying to be useful, they’re just pump-and-dump schemes. Meaning the founders pump up people’s interest with “ScamToken will be the next Bitcoin, don’t miss this amazing opportunity, convert your $$$ into ScamToken now while it’s cheap!” Then they dump all their tokens, selling them to all the people they’ve convinced to buy. It isn’t long before the hype fades, the cold reality of “we can’t do anything with this” sets in, and the buyers are left with wallets full of tokens nobody new will buy, while the founders walk away with the $$$.

But some people are playing a longer game. They don’t want their currency to get “an afternoon’s worth of excitement from hyped-up crypto speculators” and then immediately flop. They want it to be useful for actually buying something, so it has a legitimate basis for getting some actual, stable value in the long run.

Or, failing that…they want it to appear to be useful for buying something. So it looks more credible. So the excitement lasts longer. So you reach outside the circle of “people who follow crypto for its own sake” and get the attention of “people who don’t care about crypto at all, but who do care about whatever Something you’ve convinced them your token will buy.”

So, hey: how big, do you think, is the market of people who care about digital art?

Now start paying attention to how many press releases for “an amazing opportunity to buy some cool new Non-Fungible Tokens” include “by the way, the specific Tokens we’re selling are from a cryptocurrency you’ve never heard of, let alone bought.”

[lastvalyrian]

This explanation is fairly concise and still gets to the point. I don’t think you could cover all of these facets that are relevant to the topic with meaningfully less text. And the post is still that long.

That’s another aspect of the crypto/NFT scam: you need to understand how cryptography and economics works and all the connecting parts between them. If someone levels a critique against them, crypto bros can always come out of the woodwork with another level of this whole construct and likely catch the complainer off guard with something they don’t know about or aren’t confident in.

The thing is though, most crypto bros are marks and also don’t understand how this works, instead they are psychologically committed to think that crypto is great because otherwise they lost a house worth of money for nothing but an ugly lion picture. The rest of them are true scammers, know exactly how this works, and rely on the complexity of it all to keep their marks in the dark.

That’s really dangerous! Almost nobody knows how this works! Legislators don’t know how crypto works, these people still don’t understand how facebook could possibly make money! And we expect them to regulate it?

It’s even worse though. Crypto exchanges are currently going mainstream, and wallstreet people are thinking about expanding their portfolios into crypto as well. I mean, why not? Bullshit investment instruments that serve no real purpose, that no normal person can understand and that are woefully underregulated is their whole deal! As soon as that happens the current crypto bro scammers will probably be edged out by the entrenched scam industry, i.e. the international financial sector.

Once that happens, it will practically be impossible to regulate crypto in any way. If finance has a tool to make money off, it will use its considerable influence over the political system that is stays that way.

That’s why I think it’s so important to make fun of crypto and NFTs now. It’s not just because it’s fun to laugh at those idiots (even though it really is fun). The narrative on crypto still hasn’t solidified. The average person has basically only heard of it and probably thinks it’s some kind of new techy invention that will revolutionise the economy (just like previous techy inventions that revolutionised the economy - at least that’s what the story is) and that some people got really rich off it. That might be good, right?

If instead the prevalent association with the term NFT is some losers with purple lion icons losing their shit because they paid 200k for an ugly image and then someone downloaded it from twitter, the whole “industry” suddenly loses a lot of its cool factor.

[lastvalyrian]

By the way, this is why I use “dunning-krugerrand” as the tag for crypto stuff. The Dunning-Kruger effect is when competent people falsely consider themselves incompetent or when incompetent people falsely consider themselves competent. Crypto technology and culture is set up in such a way that it accomplishes both.

[dracogotgame]

So, India is dying.

Look, I know a good number of you are from the US and things aren't amazing there either, but my country is literally on the brink of collapse. So I'd love it if we could talk about that for a minute.

If you can't do anything else, please just read and reblog.

A second COVID wave has taken out the healthcare system. There are no more hospital beds. There's an oxygen shortage. There's a critical vaccine shortage. The Central Government has thrown its hands up and is passing the baton to the State Governments to do what they can.

There are over 16 million covid cases. A record 330,000 new cases reported yesterday - comparable to the US at its peak. 187,000 dead as of today.

There is no plan.

Mass cremations are taking place. The cremation grounds are running day and night and they are short on wood. People are watching their loved ones die while waiting for a hospital bed, and then they're unable to give them the proper burial rights.

Hospitals are overwhelmed. Patients are being confined, two to a bed. They're the lucky ones.

We are on the verge of people dying in the streets.

This is the second-most populous country in the world. The largest democracy. A country that encapsulates over 15,000 years of recorded human history and has endured everything from famine to invasion to colonisation.

We might be at the end. This might be the thing that does us in.

People are dying.

People are dying.

People are dying and there is no plan.

More good news? Variants are popping up. A double mutation strain has shown up. It is resistant to current vaccines. This will not go away. This is the devastation they warned of when the anti-maskers were out protesting the minor inconvenience of covering their face in public.

My country is on the verge of an emergency state. Our government has failed us. This is as dire a situation as it ever could be.

Look. I don't do much with my life. I write fics, some of you have read them and that's pretty much it. I spend my days with my head in the clouds because that's where I like to be.

But two days ago, my grandmother tested positive, had to be taken to hospital and the ambulance caught fire.

She barely made it to the urgent care she needs.

So, here I am, using whatever meager platform I have to cobble this request together. Because I have to do something.

If you can, donate.

Or spread the word.

Help. Please.

[veronicasummersfelton]

To put things in perspective,

1 USD = 75.22 Indian rupees

1 euro = 90.99 Indian rupees

1 pound = 104.40 Indian rupees

Even a small amount of 5 or 7 or 10 of foreign currency will help a lot. Our government has essentially abandoned us. People have turned to social media for help. WhatsApp groups and DMs on twitter/insta is where we find help. Our helpline is a Google doc. Situation is so dire that hospitals are discharging patients due to lack of oxygen. Every night the same story, oxygen running out in hospitals, citizens running around to somehow arrange for oxygen with minutes to spare. Last night, we had manged to get oxygen to a hospital with 14min to spare.

Please, PLEASE help. 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

[groundzero-and-deku]

LINKS LINKS LINKS

^ that post has links to petitions and donations PLEASE boost the versions of this post with links!!

[dracogotgame]

Reblogging with more links. Listen to @groundzero-and-deku ☝️ they know what they're talking about.

Some of you in the US have asked what else you can do. I'm not the best person to answer this since I'm not from there, but I do know that Biden is being urged to ship supplies to India. Maybe a more informed person can chime in with how best you can help but calling your representative and registering your concern sounds like a good starting point.

From one democracy to another, thank you. Please keep this going, you're all amazing.

[dracogotgame]

Reblogging one more time

EDIT: Reblogging with donation and resource links all in one place: Here's a great post with links to petitions in the US and UK and a list of active charities and donation centres in India

And some more donation links from @spacegirlstuff

Here and Here

Some more posts with links, resources, and ways to help collected by @groundzero-and-deku who is doing the absolute most:

Here and Here

A few more NGOs that are helping:

Habitat for Humanity India

Oxfam India

Give India

Uday Foundation

Goonj

Not every listed charity has the infrastructure to accept international donations, so please be sure to check this list which has specific information about charities that can and are accepting international donations.

Also re-adding the link to the give2asia charitable foundation for those who don't want to go through the whole post.

One more comprehensive resource link here

And another one with many more NGOs, resources for oxygen and plasma, and other info

Y'all, this is a good time to mention that I am not affiliated with any charity or donation center and am not receiving donations on behalf of anyone.

This is a list of resources compiled partly by me and more importantly, by other people who have a better grasp on the situation than myself.

They are to the best of our knowledge great resources but I still encourage you to do your research and put your money where you believe it will be used best.

If you find more ways to help or donate, add them in a reblog - let's get as much information out there as possible.

Much love and please stay safe

PLEASE BOOST THIS VERSION OF THE POST WITH THE EXTENDED LIST OF LINKS TO DONATIONS AND RESOURCES

[dracogotgame]

UPDATE:

The number of new cases has almost hit the 350,000 mark. The total number of covid cases in the country is just shy of 17 million. This is the situation as of 25 April 2021.

Covid update: India reports nearly 3.5 lakh new cases, record fatalities

The active tally is nearing the 27-lakh mark .The country has so far administered 14,09,16,417 anti-Covid jabs

Things are dire. People are largely on their own now and help, if any, is yet to come.

President Biden is being urged to ease restrictions or remove to embargo on raw materials that could be critical in India's fight against the virus.

Just a while ago, the US government committed to helping with "a small supply of inputs and components from US companies for production of COVID-19 vaccines in India".

U.S. racing to send aid to India as COVID-19 cases soar

By Andrea Shalal WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) -The United States is deeply concerned by a massive surge in coronavirus cases in India and will

There are no specifics yet and time is of the essence.

Friends in the US, we know you're in the middle of your own fight. We want you safe.

But a stockpile of tens of millions of vaccines exists in the US, a fraction of which could make all the difference to India right now.

No one needs to die. Things are bad but Indian lives can still be saved without costing American ones.

We've been allies for decades.

We need your help.

Please, please, please find it in your heart to help.

Call your local representative and register your concern. Urge them to offer India aid by way of donating some of the vaccine stockpiles and removing the ban on raw material exports so lives can be saved.

Take this message to other platforms. Spread the word. Those of you on Twitter, please use your voice to promote #indianeedsoxygen.

Most importantly, DONATE WHERE YOU CAN. As little as 5 dollars can make a difference right now.

Example: here is a screenshot from the page for Making the Difference on Donatekart

As little 7 dollars can get someone a bed or an oxygen tank.

Here's a list of independent NGOs and charities that are largely accepting international donations. REMEMBER: OXYGEN is the need of the hour.

I've heard from multiple sources that the government-run PM CARES fund is not directing funds to where they're needed and while I don't have exact information, I would advise you to avoid this platform out of caution.

Some of you are rightly concerned about where your money is going.

Again, I do not represent any charity or NGO, am not affiliated with anyone and am not involved in any stage in the collection or distribution of your donations. I'm just a person doing whatever she can so please do a little bit of research to help you identify the best place to put your donation.

Charity Navigator is a good place to get a good overview of your NGOs.

At the very least, please don't let this post die. Don't let more people die. Keep reblogging and yelling about it on social media.

As someone else pointed out in the notes, there is no central helpline. All we have is each other and the little we can do in the face of this chaos.

We're resorting to social media to get help and spread awareness. We have literally the same tools you do. Please don't let this die yet. Please get the word out if you can't do anything else.

Thank you so much and please, keep us in your thoughts.

[conceptadecency]

25 April 2021

[valtsv]

anyone else remember being like 13 years old and watching that scene in how to train your dragon (2010) where hiccup carefully navigates the maze of lines toothless has drawn between them without breaking or stepping on any of them and with his back to toothless and eyes shut to demonstrate how he’s willing to put total faith in him not to harm him or run away and to show humility and a desire to establish a natural bond of mutual trust instead of the arrogance to try to force toothless to submit to his will and hearing the music crescendo and fade into silence as he finally crosses the last obstacle so that they’re standing mere inches from one another, tension built on years of bad blood between their two races, so immense it’s almost like a physical barrier, separating them, and after what feels like forever toothless presses his nose gently into hiccup’s outstretched palm and it fits perfectly like it was made solely for that specific purpose, and feeling all the hairs on your neck stand up and a stifling sensation that brought actual tears to your eyes rise in your throat as it touched something profound and full of unspeakable yearning inside you

[davvngwa]

You just want a dragon

[undead-bi-dinosaur]

Well of course I want a fucking dragon

[kaijuno]

wake up babe new sport just dropped

[vikingofficial-deactivated20241]

Air rights in America are 500ft above the tallest building in urban areas. Below that is considered the property of the owner. The police are effectively on their property without a warrant. Shoot them down and file a lawsuit immediately

[fry-score]

Rebloging for the legal solution to a problem that has only been adressed physically until now.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

[cages-boxes-hunters-foxes]

do you ever read about clean eating and intermittent fasting and cleanses and all that shit and just think about how good the wellness industry is as repackaging dangerous and disordered eating habits as shiny wellness routines and become literally enraged

[sabrina-png]

my boss was talking about how he’s intermittent fasting and i said sarcastically “well NOW it’s cool and trendy but when i was doing it they called it an eating disorder” and my partner cracked up but my boss didn’t know what to say and i’d say the look on his face was priceless as he realized the similarities

[strawberrygiorno]

this has become such a problem that there’s a name for it - orthorexia. while it hasn’t been officially added to the dsm, there is a push being made by psychologists to make more people aware of the disorder and the dangers of “clean eating”

[brightlotusmoon]

YES.

[eunyisadoran]

Therapist: What an excellent way to allow yourself to imagine hope and healing in a safe container. That’s very wise of you.

[halfwayinlight]

My therapist legit thought fic was a very creative outlet to process my emotions and experiences

[brightlotusmoon]

Baby Writer Me, in the 90s and 00s, traumatizing characters both canon and original: This is amazing, can I just keep doing this?

Random haughty writers and editors: Obviously there’s something wrong with you, stop doing that to your characters.

My ADHD Therapist, many years later: Oh, that’s fantastic, please keep on doing it.

See? Those snobby editors back then were wrong all along.

[madronasky]

Writing as therapy is well established. Fuck anyone who says different. Write. Write for your goddamn life.

[blackmartian]

Watching people on twitter vehemently deny fatphobia’s existence while being extremely fatphobic is so funny to watch. Everybody loves “natural bodies” unless they’re overweight huh Bc we all know we can accurately guess somebody’s entire health status just from a number on a scale!

[blackmartian]

it’s just blowing me Bc people are constantly talking about body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and unrealistic body standards but....nobody wants to acknowledge that it’s normal to be fat? That it is OKAY to be fat? People starve their children, monitor their weight, they’ll break up with partners for gaining weight, some people don’t even think fat people are attractive at all or automatically call them lazy for just...existing. All that projection Bc they’re scared of fatness and the idea of being fat legitimately bothers thin people (most of whom are unhealthy themselves) to the point where they oppress and bully fat people for having the audacity to EXIST

[blackmartian]

like just read these replies and tell me western society doesn’t hate fat people

[jhan-jy]

Hey if anyone here has twitter pls like Bad's tweet!!

This would be so beneficial and helpful to people than any other reply I know we love Tubbo and other mcyts but this would be far better than buying more toasters or other materialistic values so please like if you can or try to spread this!! UPDATE: Bad surpassed Tubbo in likes!! You can still keep liking if you want! Thank you everyone for helping ^^

[itsnothingofinterest]

You know, it’s really weird to see people hate on Dabi/Touya for “pitying himself” or “throwing a temper tantrum” or other such immature things by people trying to defend Endeavor when like, 90% of Endeavor’s redemption arc spent off the battlefield has been spent moping about it.

Like, he mopes that Shoto doesn’t like him.

He mopes that his whole family doesn’t like him and he’s not welcome at dinner.

He mopes about how he traumatized Rei right into a mental institution.

And he mopes that he let his son die,

And how his guilt led to him convincing himself to hurt his family more; he mopes even about that.

And those aren’t even half his major moping moments. Just. So much time spent pitying himself that could be spent doing anything else. I wouldn’t even hate it so much if it caused him to really put the effort into atoning, which he sometimes does & I won’t deny that, but he has such a bad atoning-to-moping ratio that it gets insufferable fast. God, at least Touya managed to turn his “self-pity” towards something productive; that being ruining his father and everything he represents that he used to justify hurting his wife & children. And yes, he kills people to accomplish that; but it’s still infinitely less unbearable than Enji’s 200+ chapter pity party about all the bad things he did to himself and his ‘loved’ ones, so I still end up liking Dabi more.

[redphlox]

"...I don’t know why, but I start crying.”

I think what Touya says here speaks volumes about the level of neglect, abandonment, and accumulation of grief he’s experiencing. Crying is a mechanism designed to regulate emotions, self soothe, relieve stress, and connect with others, which is why many of us feel better after releasing a few tears. 

However, crying never made Touya feel better because he never felt understood, seen, worthy, or validated. To him, his tears never meant anything to anyone - a baby’s cry alerts their parent or caretaker they need something, and a teen or adult crying causes others around them to worry for them, but for Touya, no one saw his tears and reacted. Instead of his evident sadness being acknowledged, his actions were scolded and he was expected to act rationally when emotions don’t work like that. No one asked him to explain why being a hero was so important to him that he started self-harming. What he was met with instead was, “Why don’t you understand? Why can’t you stop burning yourself?” If someone had pried, they would have realized that he felt unloved and unwanted by his father, and that that broke his heart.

The fact that Dabi can’t cry now is incredibly sad and concerning because Touya was once a very expressive child. His personality fits his quirk - he was vibrant, he was fiery, he was passionate, he was expressive. When he felt emotions, he felt them deeply, like his siblings. Now that he hasn’t been able to cry for ten years, he has consciously and subconsciously developed habits to cope with his emotions because he physically cannot relieve himself by crying. He grins when Hawks accuses him of not looking like “someone who had just seen his friend die.” And of course Dabi didn’t, he literally can’t release those emotion, so he represses them, or else he’ll literally self-destruct if he dwells on them. This is why he holds people at a distance, why he doesn’t let others in, why he doesn’t care about what happens to himself - he has numbed himself. 

[acreaturecalledgreed]

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

[falliblefabrial]

What is the most important step a man can take?

The next.

[inklesspen]

[babblingfishes]

I think part of the pushback about this is the idea that, to “redeem” bad people, their victims must first forgive them for unforgivable acts.

This is false. No one is obligated to forgive you. You can learn from your mistakes and become the best, kindest person on earth, and the people you’ve hurt still won’t forgive you, and you’ll have to accept that. And that doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to grow. Because we aren’t just “pure” or “sinful”, we’re complex.

[tombliboos]

Hello, guys. My mother's friend has a 16-months-old baby, Rosanna, who suffers from a rare and severe form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy (Type 1 SMA). Unfortunately, the very expensive life saving treatment is legalised and paid for by the Italian government only for children under 6 months, that means Rosanna is not eligible because she's too old.

The treatment (a drug called Zolgensma) costs 2 million euros, it is among the most expensive drugs out there; it only needs to be taken once but it has to be administered before the baby turns two. The parents have decided to do a fundraising hoping to raise enough money to pay for the treatment themselves. It worked once for this Hungarian toddler.

In case Rosanna shouldn't make it, the money will be devolved to another family in the same situation.

I know we're in a pandemic, I myself have little money, so the goal would be to raise a very little amount from a large number of people. They've already raised 200k, not counting the money coming from other sources, so it's a good start.

Here's the GoFundMe, it's both in Italian and English. If you cannot donate, a reblog would be very much appreciated.

Un aiuto per Rosanna, organized by Il Barone Andrea Maisto

Ciao a tutti siamo Andrea e Tina, genitori di una bimba speciale, unica e rara, di nome R… Il Barone Andrea Maisto needs your support for Un

[hamliet]

So now we know that Dabi’s flames basically function as his tears, which is super interesting on a meta level. Tears can be replaced by violence–both are often expressions of pain–but guess which response gets more sympathy? (Not to say they are equivalent responses inherently either; they aren’t, but that uh, wasn’t always the case for Touya either.) 

It also sheds new light on how Dabi responded to Hawks’ accusations about not crying over Twice’s death. Also, as pointed out to me by @nessidy, Hawks’ own monologue about Dabi’s flames being hotter than ever after he killed Twice certainly add to the idea that Dabi did, in fact, care about Twice’s death even if he then used it to his advantage.

[linkspooky]

The Todorokis and the Shimuras…

The Shimura family is the set up for how we are supposed to judge the Todorokis. They were the original broken house that fell apart. Everything in Shigaraki’s flashback, informs Dabi’s flashback later. We see the same abusive dynamics repeating again and again, and yet nobody learning from them. @logicalbookthief wrote almost a week ago and it turned out to be near clairyvoyant to this weak’s chapter. 

Interesting that Dabi, Shigaraki and Toga all internalized the idea they’re “bad” or “not good (enough)” as children. Interesting how rather than discouraging this idea, the adults around them reinforce that they don’t deserve the care a “good” or “perfect” child would be entitled to, by seeing their pain and doing nothing to help.

Shigaraki and Dabi are established as foils precisely because, they ar both children who, literally no matter what in their household, kept trying to be good heroes. However, every adult around them treated them like they were the problem, that they were at fault for what went wrong in the household, no matter how hard they struggled to be good they were labeled as “bad children.” They’re the scapegoats of their household, and as they grow into adults they become the scapegoats of society. “Do you really want to be a hero?” is asked to both Shigaraki and Dabi, they can’t be seen as good

Keep reading

[24ozsteak]

thinking about that WoW epidemic

[24ozsteak]

[swampgallows]

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

[wheel-skellington]

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

[the-jellyfish-galaxy]

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.