Labor camp if you do, labor camp if you don’t. Unless you’re a 14yo biological girl. There’s a different camp for you.

Creepers often contain compartments for hiding one’s stash beneath the insole.

Thanks. If anything, this friendship/relationship has taught me why people with similar trauma and personalities can be great for emotional intimacy (we get it) but also absolutely toxic when our trauma forged defenses and coping mechanisms rise up. She’s given me a lot of insight into “oh, so that’s what it’s like to deal with me when I act like that”. Love her to death but we’re not the match.

One can find someone who is their friend, is someone they love, and with whom they have a great sexual relationship but still get zoned into “it’s complicated”. If reality wasn’t so messy, and we didn’t have such fucked up childhoods, my ride or die and I would be a perfect couple. Instead we’re sometimes fuck buddies, sometimes lovers, sometimes friends, sometimes play relationship. It’s complicated.

Neither will my parents, but that’s a different story. On the other hand I can spend 30 seconds walking to the end of my driveway and back to retrieve my mail and my dog thinks my return is the second coming. Pick those you invest yourself in wisely.

Begrudgingly, if they’re down for the cause. The rule that only those who “return” from exile in Northern Europe get to hold positions of power still applies.

Israel’s big reveal is going to be that they did in fact send an agent to the western hemisphere hundreds of years ago just to bury some golden tablets in upstate New York and will be activating the entirety of Deseret with the phrase “Hie to Kolob”.

I started drinking at 13 but never much. It wasn’t until about 15 i finally got blackout drunk. My peer group drank hard in the late 90s and were the binge drinking bar crowd of the early 00s. I’ve lost a few friends to ODs combining booze and pills, accidents while drunk, escalation to heroin, and once had to be resuscitated when i drank so much i quit breathing. It wasn’t until my late 30s that i finally got sick of living like that and reigned in my drinking. Now i never drink at home and maybe go out one afternoon for happy hour and am home by 10 rather than closing out the bar every night.

Alcohol is a rough one because it’s not only an addictive substance, it has a strong social component. When you drink hard your social circle becomes others who drink hard, if you try and quit you have no friends. If you have a hard time making friends while sober but are more at ease with a little buzz, you’ll end up right back at a bar. I’ve been going to the same bar for over 20yrs and there’s regulars who were there before me still on the same barstools.

I’ve pondered on the idea that, although not comfortably, you could in theory have any bone in your body surgically removed and live to see it. Except your skull. You’ll never see your own skull.

According to the Pope’s biographer, when the guy complained about his depiction the Pope said “My jurisdiction extends only to Heaven, not to Hell. In Hell you must remain.”

I graduated in 2000 and a buddy bought a domain to host a forum so our friend group could stay in touch before social media took off. We kinda fell off when MySpace, then FB got big, but now that we’ve all abandoned the latter it’s how we stay in touch.

Nah, they’ll survive. It’ll just kill all the buds on your trees and your bulbs that were duped into poking up.

Most of the big names in scifi/fantasy/action/comedy, so here’s the less common personal favs:

Lake Placid, Hellraiser III, Beastmaster 1 & 2, Heavy Metal, Heavy Metal 2000, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, SLC Punk, Disney’s Robin Hood, Dead Alive, Night of the Lepus, MST3K the Movie, Aquateen Hunger Force Movie Film for Theaters, The Ewok Adventures

Are you encountering these kinds of people when you organize in person in your community or in the vast sea of internet anonymity? If they’re in the real world and so obtuse that your group cannot find any common ground to build on and they’re a liability, show ‘em the door. If they’re online you can attempt a discussion but when it’s obvious from their trolling or lack of response, fuck ‘em. They’re not in it for real change and their only effort towards it is to cause dissension among those willing to put in the work. Eventually this will boil over and leaders will emerge, some might be libs, some anarchists, some socialists, some tankies. Their broad views might differ but the short term goal of confronting fascism will force cooperation and survival. The dipshit playing “more leftist than thou” in their basement will continue to do nothing and will continue to post contrarian content even if the world shifts in their favor because their sense of self depends on being unique in their dissension. There’s also a very real possibility the loudest voices have no dog in the fight because they’re not even what they present themselves to be.

The internet can connect and foster discussion, but not everyone here is worth connecting with or talking to.

Ignore the people trying to stir up dissent among the factions of the resistance. The ability to make edgelord extremist memes is either a luxury of the poster, ignorance, or a deliberate attempt to stoke division.

The left does struggle to put aside differences of opinion on what the ideal future looks like, how to achieve it, and which fires need to be dealt with first. Extreme purity tests are also strangling us. We shouldn’t abandon our values but we also shouldn’t march to extinction patting ourselves on the back saying “well at least I never compromised”. We’re not just damning ourselves, we’re damning our families, our communities, and future generations.

Americans still have one shot at changing course; midterms. There’s a sliver of hope that elections still matter. It won’t instantaneously undo the damage done, but it would be a step. If that’s taken from us, either through cheating, interference, or flat out ignored… welp, fuck it, the America we knew, its pros and cons, is gone. Then every leftist and lib is in the same boat and we’ll be forced to join or die.

In the real world we are talking. While I think protesting is a lost cause under this regime it is a great place to network. When shit hits the fan it’s going to be your community that you need to rely on. Mutual aid networks, food growing/sharing, first aid, gun safety, plans on how to care for the most vulnerable, all that kind of stuff is getting discussed. That kind of stuff ignores purity politics because it’s not political, it’s just the values of the people involved.

You’ve seen it yourself, even the most peaceable of people are contemplating what a worst case scenario might look like and recognizing that a fight might mean shoulder to shoulder with those we don’t 100% align with. The French Resistance didn’t have singular political goal, “fuck these fucking Nazis” was good enough.

Without others you’re just a lone gunman fighting for your own opinions and values, like Ted Kaczynski mailing bombs. Some were for his “cause”, some were for personal revenge. If you publish your manifesto ahead of time you’ll probably get caught, if you publish after and it turns out you’re a selfish nut-job there’s no movement (except for maybe a handful of other nut-jobs). Even if you do succeed, realistically your targets are easily replaceable cogs, not the clockmakers. And the clockmakers are a bureaucracy, even the masters are replaceable, the entire factory has to be torn down. Is it that difficult to understand why we’re not yet at the tipping point where people are ready to abandon their jobs, family and social stability, and possibly lives to fight in the streets? It currently risks everything and gains nothing. Some of it is keyboard warrior talk, but I’d wager there’s a steadily increasing populace slowly preparing themselves for drastic action, they just want it to have real purpose and hopefully achieve something if it’s going to potentially cost them everything.

“I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” -John Brown

The war isn’t just with those in power, who as someone else pointed out are far beyond the reach of the average American, it’s with our neighbors and family members that support these leaders and policies. This administration is the fruit of a rotten tree, remove it without addressing the roots and it will just grow back in some new form, maybe next year, maybe next decade. Our elected officials that oppose this admin on paper do nothing with their power to stop it. Our courts either rubber stamp it or when they do rule against it get ignored because law enforcement is complicit.

A lone wolf might strike back here and there but such actions don’t make a difference because they are quickly neutralized, their targets are easily replaceable and elevated to martyrs.

Until the opposition has some semblance of unity, leadership, and the resolve to see through what is started to the brutal, bloody, bitter end; this is America. We’ll either keep telling ourselves “next election, next release of files, next court ruling, next protest will change this” and live under perpetual disappointment and tyranny (at home and abroad), or we’ll accept violence and gamble on which side has a better resolve. Gonna get real ugly once that Rubicon is crossed, and we all know it so that’s why nobody wants to be the first. Just ask true American hero John Brown.

Couch potato.

Where’s Inigo Montoya when we need him?