Mara
future Nier game, floating alien buddy. Last of their kind. Is an asshole.

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@socratetris
Mara
future Nier game, floating alien buddy. Last of their kind. Is an asshole.
cursed, just cursed, greby af
trying to draw real eyes. Drew a face around them afterward
Sad Ennui Boy
you'll never guess who i was trying to draw
Moose Gurl face sketches.
must be more moose than girl.
Elden Ring Flower
but it has too many colors
ET Meme Stock
good idea > Bad Idea, or Bad idea > Good idea
Minish Cap and Link eat Pizza
you stumble upon them
I've been hard at work the last month making Ashes to Ashley, a cute comic about shoegaze and gender.
Thank you for reading Ashes to Ashley, hope you liked it! Special shout out to my girlfriend Alicia for her invaluable comedic input.
Kowloon’s Curse: Lost Report is a surreal RPG inspired by Japanese games from the Dreamcast and PS1-era set in a crime-riddled city filled with weird creatures!
Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Steam)
I’m so god damn tired of not just leftists, but even left-leaning people holding absolutely unrealistic, all-but-impossible positions which have no acknowledgement of any nuance whatsoever and then calling anyone who tries to give a dose of reality a shill or a bootlicker. Honestly, it’s not even enlightened to hold some of these positions because you just reveal yourself to have no grasp of incredibly complex issues. If this sounds vague, it’s because it can apply to how people online react to many different issues.
It’s always like, “X system is evil and it shouldn’t exist!”
Ok but it does. Do you have any suggestions for what people are supposed to do right here, right now? It’s really easy to sit back and make internet posts about how a system shouldn’t exist but it’s harder to do just about anything else.
God. This. Fuck. Like…leftists/left-leaning people who spout this shit exhaust me because like, I work in social services? And like…I’m on the ground in the system as it is? I work in homeless services? I worked in mental health? And, uh, okay? You can absolutely say the system as it is is broken and shouldnt exist and I will fucking agree with you but it’s never followed up with “but the system is flawed but here’s some practical things to do right now” and when ever practical things are proposed - things like “maybe change this one thing - like make more mental health services available for free? maybe change that one thing - make more ebt available?” its always jumping onto “this feeds into the oppressive system! this is perpetuation of poverty! mental health systems as they exist are colonizers!” and I’m just like…okay Friere fucking get out there in your community and practice some true fucking generosity because the false charity you’re criticizing isn’t going to dismantle itself. Fuck.
Besides, “Revolution” “Trash the system” rarely if ever brings lasting change … Usully it brings a period of instability and unrest where things are even worse and then everyone goes back to the way things where becasue no one has a better idea …
Speaking of better ideas, may I introduce you to Housing First
Housing First is a policy that offers permanent housing as quickly as possible to homeless people, and other supportive services afterward. Begun in 1988 to address the needs of homeless families with children in Los Angeles, California, Housing First was popularized in the following decades and became government policy in the United States and various other countries.
Housing First is an alternative to a system of emergency shelter/transitional housing progressions. Rather than moving homeless individuals through different “levels” of housing, whereby each level moves them closer to “independent housing” (for example: from the streets to a public shelter, and from a public shelter to a transitional housing program, and from there to their own apartment in the community), Housing First moves the homeless individual or household immediately from the streets or homeless shelters into their own accommodation.
Housing First approaches are based on the concept that a homeless individual or household’s first and primary need is to obtain stable housing, and that other issues that may affect the household can and should be addressed once housing is obtained. In contrast, many other programs operate from a model of “housing readiness” — that is, that an individual or household must address other issues that may have led to the episode of homelessness prior to entering housing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_First
I havent commented on most of these but - again - social worker. And literally no one who actually works with the homeless and knows it exists believes that any system but Housing First is going to make any fucking impact. I’m posting this from my last ever shift at a homeless shelter that did its best to work by the Housing First model. And it WORKS. Okay? I’ve seen it work. I’ve been at a non-congregate shelter for the whole fucking pandemic and instead of putting people in bunkbeds in an open room, we gave them hotel rooms with doors that lock and their own showers and tv and 3 meals a day. And the number of people I watched - in person, first hand - get employed, ease up on their substance use, find permanent housing? MASSIVE. More than I’ve ever seen in any other social services site I’ve worked. And that was JUST giving people a room of their own to go and be safe for the night and food that was THEIRS. People’s entire appearances changed when they knew - KNEW - they’d be safe for the night, when they had an address they could get their mail delivered to, when they could access wifi on their phones instead of using what little pay-as-you-go data they had. But the amount of fights I personally had with clients railing against curfew rules, mask protocol, social distancing, and drug policies? Tremendous. Some of them written, some physical, mostly verbal and often so loud and so angry - which the clients have every right to be cuz the situation does suck for them. BUT. To some degree it always boiled back down to that “why isn’t this perfect NOW?” element - although again, living in the situation gives them a lot more excuse to ask those questions and raise those complaints than anyone on the outside looking in. Doesn’t change the fact that the reason’s the same.
It’s not perfect or even better than what we are doing NOW because this is what we were allowed to fucking do. “This” is what we were ABLE to accomplish with the money and staff and medical emergency and policy available. And people are gonna throw “institution” at it, and be right, but we also got literal hundreds of people into housing and gave them a safe place to be while we did so. Why isn’t that progress good enough for RIGHT NOW some leftists? I’m not saying stop pushing. Never ever ever EVER stop pushing. Utah utilizes Housing First and - fucking shocker - has the lost homelessness rate of any state in the union. Finland is the only country that is utilizing Housing First on a national scale and - guess what - it’s also the only country where Homelessness is falling. In the last 20 years they’ve cut the number of people dealing with homelessnes IN HALF. Probably because Housing First reports a 80% retention rate - meaning only 20% of people who use the Housing First model become homeless again. Basically if 10 people are homeless and all of them are given Housing First apartments? Only 2 of them become homeless again. Substance use and mental health issues are reduced by FOURTY FUCKING PERCENT. My point here is that there are, actually, practical things that work and I know because I HAVE LITERALLY SEEN THEM WORK. Housing First? Works. Needle exchanges? Work. Food pantries? Work. Municipal community resource building of arts and recreation? Work. Restorative and pretrial-intervention justice systems? Work. THEY ALL FUCKING WORK. LESS PEOPLE SUFFER WHEN THESE ARE AVAILABLE. And if we leftists could stop - for a fucking second - dreaming glorious dreams of revolution and start fighting even half as hard for the in-system solutions that PRODUCE RESULTS NOW then maybe, just maybe, we could have enough people with their feet underneath them to actually, you know, make some of those radical fucking changes we want so badly. Anyway yeah - tonights my last night at this position and after a pandemic year in social(homeless specific) service? I needed to go off on this topicthread - just one last time.
I find the idea that we shouldn’t accept improvement and should instead hold out for a perfect system to be… almost more infuriating that conservativism.
Because it ends up hurting the same people- and those who already have it hardest get hurt the worst- but it’s harder to stomach coming from people who espouse the same values I do, but are willing to quite literally watch our friends die in the name of principle.
I’ve stopped speaking to 5 of my closest “leftist” friends in the past year and a half because they each each reached the point of advocating that people just die instead of exist in an imperfect system. The issues? Healthcare. Student Loans. LGBTQ+ protections. Healthcare again. The American Electoral system.
Yes. There are massive issues at hand. Working our entire lives, we will probably not see them all solved, and the improvements we might see will break or need improving again.
But if at any point you find yourself thinking “it would be better for people I care about to be oppressed to the point of death than for me to tolerate an improvement to the existing circumstance that isn’t everything I want to see”… well, it turns out We don’t share the same values after all.
“the glorious revolution,” were it to actually take place, would also, almost inevitably, end up doing the most harm to the already-marginalized and already-vulnerable. you can say all you want that you’ll only target the real enemies but history has shown again and again and again that really, when it comes down to it, people who have decided to solve their problems by “finding and killing the right people” will eventually find that they are out of “right people” and are no closer to solving their problems, and when that happens their answer is always to broaden the definition of the “right people to kill.”
it turns out that people for whom supposedly leftist praxis is really all about “who do i get to hurt and feel good about it?” are pretty much functionally identical to fascists! who knew!
This post speaks to my soul. I’ve worked in social work, I’ve worked in politics (in texas… ugh), and the qork is hard. There’s a lot of burnout. But leftists are so ready to crap on folks doing the real work as being servants to the system.
No. They are trying to help in a corrupt system. They are doing more to improve the lives of others than your angry twitter thread or youtube video are doing.
sign language is literally one of the coolest things on the planet to me. like. humans recognized some humans can not hear well and devised a language around that that's so fucking cool
That is so rad that theres a large enough deaf community in that area for there to a Starbucks full of people who sign!!
My wife was learning ASL before becoming an RN. She’ll be starting up again soon and I have encouraged her to teach me to help her study. I have two main takeaways from this video: 1) I hope starbucks is paying competitively for this amazing skill the staff possesses - though I doubt they are paid enough, 2) Every starbucks should just stop having music. I hate starbucks music, and writing in the quiet would be so much nicer while having an afternoon coffee.
Strayed Lights is a visually stunning parry-focused Souls-like where a being of light ventures through a dark oneiric world!
Read More & Play The Beta Demo, Free (Steam)
My First Experience with Weaponized White Woman Identity
I keep thinking about this and don’t really have an opportunity to bring it up anywhere. CW: racism, sexual abuse, domestic violence, police brutality
Back in highschool, one of my best friends and debate partner was demographically a white woman. (I was a suburban midwestern kid. These things happen.) We talked about basically anything, but I knew she came from a fairly conservative family in a very conservative community.
Trayvon Martin and the subsequent murder of black men and boys starting getting public attention. The difficulty of trying to get people to acknowledge the long-standing systemic problems of white judges and juries never seeing racially motivated violence by other whites, but easily seeing it from black offenders to white victims was challenging. (After all, it is hard to convince white people who never deal with white racism to believe it. While it is very easy to logically figure out why a black person would hate a white person. The history of the United States is justification enough for an oppressed minority to be bigoted toward a hegemonic demographic.)
This difficulty manifested as i tried to explain to my highschool friend (I was in college now) that the higher rates of murders of black men, and acquittals of white offenders, was not comparable to the simple law of large numbers that result in some police violence against white victims. How no one ever sees white on white crime as a racial issue, because white violence is just violence, non-racialized. She, debate students as we were, argued against me.
However, we were arguing about this on a public facebook post, and at some point dozens of her friends began to find, share, and comment on me personally. People dug up pictures of me in bathroom lighting to deny that I was black. (Being of mixed heritage, I don’t have prescriptive, racialized features.) People said I was a stranger harassing her, even though we had been friends for nearly 5 years.
When i confronted her about who these friends were, about how the company she keeps was actively being racist toward me to defend her, her only response was, “i’m not responsible for what they say.”
After that incident, I had to stop talking to her. Because anything we talked had a pretty high likelihood of getting harassed by her other friends. Like many people experienced on facebook, she remained on the list but interaction dropped to 0.
YEARS later, I discover that she had, at some point, changed her mind about police brutality and the race inequality issue. (A post about that is what had me thinking i could reconnect.) I also learned that she had become the victim of assault and imprisonment by a violent, inhuman misogynist whom she had tried to break up with. Her family found her after a week and forcefully removed her without the intervention of the police, who visited the man’s house once and left without investigation. I felt somewhat responsible, because years earlier I encouraged her to go to college rather than immediately jumping into the life of a married, air-force spouse. (I grew up in an airforce family, and I know about the politics of being married in the military.) I encouraged her to both get married and go to college, but that boy didn’t like the idea and the two broke up.
(I recognize that this is an irrational thought. But I was raise Catholic, and my brain likes to invent reasons for why everything tangentially related to me is therefore my fault.)
The thought I have been having recently is something of a warning to white women. Whiteness, the power and the privileges that affords, will not protect you from the violence of sexism. Nor will being Straight. Nor will being Cisgender. Nor will conforming to the standards of men, because patriarchy is inconsistent and self-serving. Those white knights who will protect you idealistically online will not be there to help you when you need it.
Family, friends, and community will help you, and those things are not fully realized if they are contingent on your conformity to sexist standards. You need family, friends, and community, as well as an understanding of violence and how to wield violence yourself in self defense.
There are many “communities” online that will try to turn your blame and your hatred to anything but the hegemonic power dynamics of our society. People will try to weaponize your vulnerability in the political world for their own ends. The answer is not to accept your vulnerability as the disenfranchised woman in society. The answer is to form community with all the other disenfranchised and minority people, to make society deconstruct the violent expectations placed upon your identity and destroy the source of that vulnerability.
It is strange to say it like this, but in this society, Blackness is synonymous with the history of oppression, not just the specific oppression of African Americans. Women, of course white women included, suffer oppression as well. You, to a certain extent, know Blackness. You know it in the way every racial minority knows Blackness. You know it in the way every LGBTQA+ person knows Blackness. You know it in the way that every man who is violently forced to conform to masculinity that doesn’t match their personality knows Blackness. You know it in the way every poor person who can’t afford food, school, healthcare, or a home knows Blackness. Blackness intersects every oppression a person can experience in the modern day, and there is empathy in Blackness. There is community in Blackness. So seek Blackness
Explanation is Backward to His Evidence
In his new book, “Sentience,” a neuropsychologist argues that consciousness evolved to make us feel that life is worth living.
First time encountering Nicholas Humphrey's philosophy of mind. Articles like these frustrate me, because so much time is spent on the travel-blog style biography such that you lose the thread on the actual ideas expressed and argued for.
I suppose thats what reading his book is for, however, from the article I gather this:
Humphrey is an epiphenominalist, meaning he sees consciousness as a byproduct of biology.
Rather than concluding that consciousness is vestigial, like most epiphenominalists, he argues that sensation is a higher part of the system, which in turn creates eu-social behaviors.
Evidence from his psychology research: humans/other animals with working sense organs (eyes) but retain the interprative part of the brain (a specific cortex named in article) can learn to behave as though they have sight, or accurately describe things they consciously cannot "see".
In other words, they lack a "sensation" - the experience of seeing - but grasp the "perception" the brain's interpretation of the visual data. They lack a sensate, but retain the percept.
4. Humphreys, as an epiphenominalist, who believe consciousness is the by-product, then describes "consciousness" as the sensation through an unstated premise. By saying things like the research shows "the system works even without consciousness." But the subjects do have an awareness of things, that awareness just isn't in sensation. It's purely conceptual.
By getting this backwards, by justifying an explanation of an already held position, imo Humphreys has missed the biggest conclusion these studies might draw for Ontological Philosophy of Mind.
A. Most philosophy of mind assumes conscious ness is the highest order of the tasks that the mind is capable of doing. That because sense-organs came first, sensation would be the first step of consciousness. (Well, movement/motorics would be closer to first, but just put that aside for now.)
B. Thanks to Humphrey's research, we may consider this postulate "Perception of sense data -percepts- actually precede sensation of sense data - sensates." In other words, knowing precedes feeling.
C. Consciousness is in perception-knowing, not in sensation-feeling.
The system of purely conceptual consciousness, of knowing and acting without the experiences of sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, pain, etc may in fact be self-sufficient for life. Having sensation is thus the higher-order level of detail that could inform the consciousness. Like Humphreys says, feeling means consciousness has another data set of subjectivity that then enables empathy, sympathy, sociability, creation of values/meaning, and any other eu-social expression. As well as all of the flaws that comes with, such as value-laden perception and confirmation bias.
(He's just wrong about where he is defining consciousness. The research/evidence is still genius!)
Evolutionarily speaking, this would also mean that the human animal evolved such that subjectivity, feelings, and value ladenness are superior to facts in terms of survival, making babies, and thriving. Subjectivity developed on top of objectivity.
Obviously, we need not devalue facts and research (we are relying on facts and research for this conclusion). Instead, we can say definitively that the facts of the subjective mind do in fact matter to the objective mind. Feelings don't have to care about facts, but facts do in fact care about feelings!
an eloquent take down of the "people are self diagnosing autism to be trendy and for attention" take that morons have been echoing on tiktok
Reblogging because I think this a good video and I think my followers would appreciate it.
Autism
Long video, but 1000% YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS!
Construction Workers "just fine"
In this article we dive into the details of the training method, known as Nuclei Overload Training. We will learn what it is, how it works…
Pulling this quote from the article as an example of flimsy reasoning, "Think about all the manual laborers, they push, pull and lift heavy stuff everyday as part of their occupation. They do just fine, performing their job everyday for many years."
Doing a quick google search after learning that the muscle absorbing extra nuclei from surrounding cells is a part of the muscle hyptertrophy process. It comes of with "Nuclei Overload Training" which is essentially extremely high volume and weight of a single muscle group for extended period of time to break past a plateau. (The article suggests every day for a full month based one... well they just guessed.)
They bring up the concern that this sort of training could result in overuse or overtraining, then dismissed the concern based on the above quote.
Perfect examples of pulling from a lack of knowledge as evidence. Construction, as an industry, has extremely high levels of personal injury, stress-induced injury, and unreported injury due to a culture of bearing through the pain. The main strategies employed by construction workers to recover are most often just sleep, over the counter pain relievers, hot or cold showers, and eating a lot of food to overcome the extreme energy use. These rest strategies are not timed and measured like a bodybuilder or powerlifter might.
They are a lifestyle.
Injury is often ignored, because family has to eat and pay bills and send their kid through school.
A general practice doctor, or a rehabilitation specialist should be consulted before saying that construction workers are "just fine" and without injury. Working despite their injuries is often the norm.
Now the article does not really suggest one should do this kind of training. (Surely there may be a way to get the same effect without going to failure if one was to exercise every day for a month.) Ultimately it isn't dangerous to say the method may not be practical.
But being dismissive of health and safety is what I didn't like about this.
Completely Coincidental...
Hanlim Gym: Any resemblance to persons, organizations, religions, places, or events are purely coincidental and used in a fictitious manner.
Also Hanlim Gym: HEY GUYS LET’S WARCH RETURN OF THE DRAGON, THAT'S BRUCE LEE, THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD! WE STUDY THE VERY SPECIFIC MARTIAL ARTS STYLE JEET KUN DO AND NEVER LOSE AND OUR POWER LEVEL IS 9999!
https://www.webtoons.com/en/sports/hanlim-gym/episode-37/viewer?title_no=2850&episode_no=37