maybe this is obvious asf and maybe its the vitamin deficiency but I heard this quote in a video that was roughly like “your intentions don’t matter as much as the impact of your actions”and it lowkey clicked for me because I always thought that I’ve had so many falling outs with people because I’m “mean”… but tbh you could be the nicest person like polite or people pleasing or whatever and then still be a psychological terrorist due to carelessness/dangerous self unawareness… it doesnt help that so much of self help rhetroic and TherapySpeakTM is about centering your feelings and viewing all altercations bewteen people as like 50/50 good faith conversations when at the end of the day sometimes you’re just the problem… like it doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to be… #I'mTheProblemSummer
it’s kinda difficult to talk about “cozy games” because that’s an aesthetic and not a genre so its very broad, is it cozy to de clutter an apartment or go on a hike, is it cozy to be action packed or melodramatic or blithely unconfrontational, etc. but I think it’s accurate to say that coziness is one of many shorthands that have been developed as an attempt to opt out of ideology, be about nothing. of course with a game made to evoke comfort comes a proclamation of what the author’s society considers comfy
witch finding a lost cat in the alps was a cultural turning point, cus she spelled that out. expressly pointedly de-politicizing a text, replacing it with a generalized intentionally generic vibe that is implicitly assumed to be outside of politics for its genericism. taking a white protagonist in a text willing to ruminate on race and power & replacing it with a white protagonist who is white cus it’s a fantasy setting and we know what those are supposed to be like, the two races are white and political
people are misunderstanding this very slightly. “cozy” games CAN be political, in fact the thing i was trying to say is that they must be political, and in trying to make something distanced from politics and “the real world” you can extremely easily end up making something unintentionally revealing. depictions of people are political, depictions of landscapes are political, abstraction is political because it is not simply a defiance of representation but a broadening of scope and influence and a narrowing of metaphor towards medium.
*deep, calming breath* On the plus side, the steps at that link were very clear and easy to follow.
Important note: Definitely do Method Two. Method One will make the chat feature invisible, but it may pop up again; Method Two will make it go away entirely.
i know most leftists agree that everybody should have a right to food, water, shelter, and healthcare but i think a vitally important fifth pillar is privacy. people should not be compelled to be tracked, monitored, or to share personal space with others to access their other essential rights
we need to invent a way to explain how deep running and pervasive and subliminal racism and antiblackness is without immediately sounding like an insane conspiracy theorist
female characters are always lighter than male characters. strong characters are almost always dark. aggressive characters are almost always dark. peaceful and intelligent characters are almost always light. even amongst darker characters the lightest one is usually either the leader or the girls. dark is evil and light is good.
if you try to explain this to a white person they look at you like youre insane
speaking of peeing the bed it’s been long enough that i can tell this story publicly. in high school i went to a party at some house with no adults, as you sometimes would, and at the end of the night like 10 people all clonked out together in the same bed. fully clothed, one of those teenage moments where you’re like wow heehee how rule-breaking, because sure a lot of our parents wouldn’t like us sleeping in a bed with a bunch of other teenagers and no adult supervision blah blah. fond memories. anyway.
i’m an extremely light sleeper, so i barely slept, and sometime around 6 am, i woke up to a girl totally panicking, very quietly, because she peed the bed in her sleep. and listen. this wasn’t a group of mean kids by any measure. but there’s no level of kindness or understanding in the world that will make peeing the bed when you’re 17, surrounded by people you only sort of know, a gentle blow.
so i sat up and she was like “oh my god” and I signaled at her to be absolutely silent and I said I’d be right back. And I crawled over everyone and out of the bed like a stupid cat.
and the thing is, by senior year i wasn’t getting bullied much anymore. i was generally pretty well liked by my peers, but, if this makes sense, people still didn’t always expect very much from me. i was still figuring out how to mask (autistic) and i still often said or did something that made everyone remember i’m weird and they’d just be like “well. that’s story for you. i guess.” and for the most part i’d become pretty secure in that.
so what i’m saying is i had nothing to lose and this girl had everything to lose.
so i went downstairs and i made tomato soup. and by “made” i mean i put a whole can of tomato soup in a too-small mug and microwaved it until it was lukewarm so as to be convincingly “made” but not so hot to burn someone.
and then i walked back upstairs, and no longer like a cat, i clumsily “attempted” to crawl back into bed, loudly lost my balance, and spilled tomato soup all over the girl and her lap and several other people’s laps and heads and the mattress.
everyone woke up confused and anguished and i was like, “oh my god, I’m so sorry. I just got really hungry and it’s all i could find.”
and everyone immediately accepted with absolutely no further questions that I would go downstairs, make tomato soup at 6 am,and bring it back to bed. everyone just begrudgingly climbed onto the floor and went back to sleep while I put the bedding right into the laundry.
i don’t even know this girl’s name. i only remembered this story recently because i’m in my hometown for a few months and recently a high school acquaintance said, “hey. do you remember spilling soup on everyone after prom? why did you do that?” and for a moment i genuinely did not and i stared at them completely dumbfounded while the memory loaded and then i started laughing too hard to answer for 2 minutes.
the best part is i can tell this story, and even if it reaches the people who were there, none of them will know which one of them peed the bed. thanks to tomato soup.
people keep pointing out how bewildering this must have been from her point of view and it’s making me laugh to tears. i never considered it. i had such a solid plan in my head. i went downstairs to find something to dump on the bed and when i saw the tomato soup i knew it was perfect because it has a distinct smell that would cover anything else and a color which would do the same.
i was so focused on my mission that in the 14 years since i’ve never once considered what it must have been like for her to decide to trust me because she had no other options, sit there in anguish for three minutes, and then watch me walk back into the room and dump soup on everyone.
your single-minded determination would have read as complete confidence. you would have seemed like you had that locked and loaded. on it, boss. don’t worry, champ. I’ve seen shit you wouldn’t imagine.
“They’re trying to convince people they can’t do the things they’ve been doing easily for years – to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies – to write that for you.” We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, “that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won’t know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can’t do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won’t have to process grief, because you’ll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it’s going to destroy humans, long before there’s a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people.”
Justine Bateman on AI in this article from The Guardian
18th July 2025
Reblogged From heating-element
Notes: 50349
