Posts you had second thought about and decided not to post - put them here

i don't know that the island in the tempest works the same way as arden in AYLI. prospero's domination of the island, psychic deformation of caliban, stringing along of ariel, stunting of miranda etc are all signs of the world's disharmony, which can only be repaired by returning the island to caliban/setting ariel free/letting miranda go. colonialism in the tempest is not the solution to anything but a manifestation of the problem, a symptom of a vain disease of control; in order for prospero+alonso's reconciliation to be effected, the island must be un-fucked.

in contrast if the aristocratic hipsters in AYLI were fucking up arden (and they might be! roz/celia strolling in and buying someone's house on a whim is literally gentrification) that really would be framed by the play as the acceptable price of their revitalization. but the inequity between the vacationers and the locals is only v lightly ~problematized~ (there seems to be a lot of space in arden) whereas in the tempest it is the whole play, the source of everyone's fear or rage.

2014 me says great band. 2016 me says best band. Now me sez i hope they get ALL your money that was fun. it’s the only way i have to deal with like— this and not wanting to deal with all— this stuff and those ppl

Shocked to my core that the centre sided with the right, who could have seen this coming

this thread needs to be quarantined and kept away from the rest of ILX in case the contagion spreads

the poetics of My Dick

semiotics, surely

dialecdick

can the dialecdick break bricks?

how much dick could a dickchuck chuck if a dickchuck could chuck dick

put away those semiotimatic weapons

I feel like completely abolishing the military is kind of a moralist kink for some. And I don’t think militaries should exist, but the idea one of your descendants is going to get mowed down or subjugated because you decided all defense was bad is a projection someone’s making in their mind and probably horny about it

it's almost like some smug bourgeois comfortable motherfuckers have such an innately incurable self preserving resistance to class politics that they can't get out of their bore-space of posting lots of long and really boring as fuck, barely readable without losing the will to live. One after the other, posts that reveal nothing other than you are an absolute arsehole - chat gpt is getting jealous though!

b-b-b-but what about all that heart-stopping, brain-numbing, ear-destroying, cgi-enhanced action!

i got some trepidation about this but i wanna talk a little about my experience of queer trauma.

i was taught early and often to hate myself and to be ashamed of myself, to think of myself as a Bad Person. villains in movies like Dressed to Kill and The Silence of the Lambs were the closest thing i had to trans role models. i didn't admire these people. i didn't want to be like them. i found them repulsive and disgusting.

i hated myself, hated my body, found myself repulsive and disgusting. but that was different.

the truth about me, the truth about who i was, was literally unthinkable to me. it was worse than the worst thing i could imagine. so i thought about the worst shit i could imagine instead.

it's certainly an oversimplification, but there's these transfem memes. there one using the kid looking at the two castles and one's labelled "trans woman" and the other is labelled i don't know "fascist", and there's another with the evolution of some pokemon, i don't know all their names but one is vileplume i think, showing two evolution paths, where vileplume is "white supremacist" and the other one is "trans lesbian communist". and again i don't think it's _true_, i think that's just how a lot of us see ourselves.

most of us have a lot of internalized self-hatred. we work with it, we learn to live with it. but we also have to be careful around each other, because sometimes people will externalize it. growing up thinking of myself as disgusting for being trans created a sort of cognitive dissonance in me. i thought my transness made me repulsive, but all the other trans people i saw, i thought they were amazing and hot and awesome. there's two basic ways to resolve that. i learned to stop hating myself. some people decide instead to hate other trans people.

or, fuck it, why stop with just trans people? why not just hate _everyone_? why not conclude that human beings are disgusting, vile creatures, and it's better not to be born? i did that for a while too. i fucked around with antinatalism. there was some show called "true detective" or something where one of the characters was an antinatalist. a ligotti type. i had friends into ligotti. i was more into cioran, because he basically wrote funny tweets decades before twitter, which means that he wasn't stuck in the capitalist hellscape cesspool that is the twitter ecosystem. there are tons of sorts of antinatalism, i'm sure, millions of dead antinatalisms. mine was just one kind. i don't think i'm necessary _like_ someone because i used to be into antinatalism.

my particular antinatalism? it was fucking bullshit. it was me hating myself for being queer and not admitting it and turning it into some fucking _universal fucking truth_, like no it's not better that i wasn't born, i haven't felt that since the day my egg cracked. being trans sucks a lot of the time but i understand that my existence is of enormous positive value to the world, that the shit i was most ashamed and afraid of, the stuff i thought was literally unthinkable, wasn't nearly as bad as some of the "worst stuff i could imagine" that i was putting myself through.

so when i read certain stuff, the lens i read it through, i tend towards that lens. and that don't say anything about the author. when i apply that lens, i don't think it _can_ be anything but a barthes thing. i'd write these long theoretical pieces and i was trying to suppress some shit very very badly, it came out sideways. i look at what i now consider "egg art", some of the stuff i wrote, and some of the lies i told myself about that i wonder how i could ever have believed it.

so when i read certain stuff i look for the stuff that comes out sideways. if someone's writing a long essay making a theoretical defense of, like, pedophilia, ugggh it's always these most taboo subjects, pedophilia and nazis and you know yeah i read "answer me!" when i was younger, edgelordy bullshit written by some piece of shit asshole. i'm not like him. obviously. (you know, if i'd lived in portland in the 90s... maybe it wouldn't have taken me quite so long to figure out how completely and totally queer i am.)

but sometimes you run across this stuff and... ok, here's someone saying that they're attracted to people who are like them, here's them complaining about specifically _gay men_ who oppose pedophilia, calling them hypocrites, here's him "joking" about being a bottom. maybe what's unthinkable for them, maybe what's worse than the worst thing they can imagine, is being railed by a hot tall twink.

and i'm not personally into being railed by a hot tall twink, but you know what, i don't think being into that is somehow worse than the total extinction of the human race. personally.

anyway. that's me talking about me. i don't know shit about other people who do horrible things. i sometimes think of myself as a horrible person who would do horrible things, but that's obviously not true. that's just what i was taught about myself.

YMP, just so you know, your smug liberal complicity in a system of violence doesn’t impress anyone except yourself. Fuck off.

"what kinda music you like?"

"...(quizzical look) so there's this band from iceland and they play rock music but not like---"

"---are you talking about sigur ros?"

"...YES!??!! You know them???? I LOVE THEM!"

and then he told me about his travels to iceland inspired by his favorite band. don't know how many times he saw them, but it was enough for him to casually lament that he "missed them on their home turf." absolute legend. rip johnathan.

"... Hinn íslenski Þursaflokkur, actually"

did it define your personality though

literally a Viking

Okay I am not sure I wish to hear about the moon-shape of your Pujols.

Like, pursue the pursuits that you wish to pursue, you do you, etc. But that bit is a trifle TMI

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/tech-executive-killed-stabbing-san-francisco-17879403.php

Cash App has the makings of a new song

That stabbing was shocking, but I'm left wondering what that guy was doing in a deserted part of South of Market near the onramp to the Bay Bridge at 2:30 in the morning.

rockablowjob

^ horribly formed all around

it's OK to not post

lol this music is so boring and horrible and badly played

imagining opening Mack McCormick's book and that's all it says

new board description

Don't Stop Movin'

yeah it was good that you decided not to post that

i mean none of them are good singers

You know what else is absolutely wild how long it took

fruita's primary claim 2 fame is its annual headless chicken festival, which is a cursed amalgamation of sunny goofy small town americana & the unspeakably eldritch

...but I did not shoot the Deputy Provost for Academic Affairs

Judge John Dude

that's

that's just a reference

two references, jammed together

everyone loves "thing & thing"

two well-known pop culture idioms, artfully combined!

is this about Judge John Dude?

The "dudes" thread had some talk about how it was pronounced "deed" somewhere or other. I thought they would all be unfamiliar with the show.

it is not about that

what ILX thread makes me angrier than all the others combined

UK politics?

nope!

oh wait, that's what ilx thread makes other posters angrier _at you_

blobismus! ?

I'm just sitting here waiting for the great reveal here, lj

It’s-a mystery

excelsior?

https://res.cloudinary.com/bloomsbury-atlas/image/upload/w_568,c_scale/jackets/9781408181706.jpg