Maybe as he loses support, Vance will resign ‘in disgust’ and the congress will finally impeach him. American Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, becomes President Johnson for 15 minutes. The Republicans try to ride the wave of righteous anger to get the ‘moral’ Americans to support a return to ‘wholesome values,’ saying Trump ‘swindled the Republican party just like he did America.’ Trump dies awaiting a court date. He’s old, so no one calls foul play. Vance riles up the same anti-whatever-you-think-is-bad sentiment, but not as well, and is supported by AI billionaires who use their GPUs, left idle because they only have three customers willing to pay what it costs to run them, to pump out pro-Vance and ‘anti-woke’ propaganda. He tries to become President Vance. He hopes for two terms because he resigned before he could be succeeded into the presidency. The democratic party rolls out Joe Biden in an iron lung to run again. America looks at the options and organises the biggest mass shooting in history, in the form of an enormous mass suicide. The survivors blame the dead and vote for Biden ‘to teach the Republican Party a lesson.’ Nothing changes.

Thanks for pointing this out. Blocking it now.

Tears of joy? Nothing, ever. But this moth is really cute.

‘Drama’ seekers and what I might call drama-pigs. There are a lot of people who think relationships are ‘supposed’ to have drama. They see versions of relationships, romantic or friendships, in dramas and romances written to be interesting from the outside and absorb it as normal. The result is deleterious. The other side of this is the drama-pigs, people who feed off of the real-life dramatics of people’s lives as entertainment. They read AITA posts or watch drama vlogs as though the people involved were characters in a story rather than real people who are dealing with real problems.

Oof, losing the moral high ground to Ford…

More of a Chirlie Kark.

That’s not how monkey’s paw twists work.

That’s less a lie and more ‘teaching the ideal.’ The problem isn’t learning how the system is supposed to work. That’s how you learn to be a mechanic. You learn how an engine is supposed to work so you can spot where it’s gone wrong. The issue is more one of there are millions of people and they get 10 minutes on how it’s supposed to work and then only 3 of them go into politics and learn how it actually works/doesn’t work. Democracy requires more than a one week chapter on civics, once a year. We all have to be mechanics, or at least be prepared to try.

There is a drive to escape suffering that can lead one to seek a way out, even at the expense of other goals. One cause of suffering is loss of social status. Young people, especially teens, can feel this suffering so acutely they kill themselves in an attempt to escape it. The human brain is not a reasonable, well-designed system. It can and will break in ways that don’t make sense to other brains because a brain cannot fully comprehend a brain.

There is no line dividing the two states. They are parts of a spectrum. We all have a need for novelty and predictability in different ratios. Find the point where your need for novelty is met, keeping you from boredom, and where your need for predictability is met, preventing burnout.

The lawn for those people is a signifier of wealth. ‘I’m so wealthy I can afford to spend absurd amounts of money on maintaining land at the level it would take to harvest a crop from it, but I do not harvest a crop from it.’ Idiots imitating boomer age idiots who were imitating mid-century idiots, who were imitating old-world, old-money assholes.

This place is not for you. No one here wants marketing on the Fediverse. Fuck off.

I’d call those pop ballads.

If you want suggestions, check out Moddi, Farao, Lindy-Fay Hella, Madrugada, Finnegan Tui, Brandon Perry

And then you befriend a stranger on the internet. You are nervous at first but you can’t see them, so you can imagine their number is zero. You hit it off. They’re amazing. Funny. Sweet. Kind. Hardworking. The relationship turns into a distant romance. Then you finally meet. You had no idea the number could go that high.

Their greatest insecurity, maybe? I could compliment cool people on it to make them feel better and use it to lampoon assholes.

Monkey paw’s finger curls: You can see them. They’re EVERYWHERE. People you thought you knew and loved have numbers greater than zero over their head. Despite your horror, you try to make use of the power to try to bring them to justice. No one believes you. You have the Cassandra’s curse of the status quo. ‘Steve? What are you talking about? He’d never do anything like that. Butter wouldn’t melt. You should probably shut your mouth before we get offended about what you said about our friend and kick the shit out of you. Know what I mean?’ You watch the news and see everyone who has a position of power over you and your loved ones has a non-zero number. You try to escape into fictional media but your favorite actors are non-zeroes, the author pictures in your favorite books show non-zeroes, the album sleeves of your favorite bands show non-zeroes.

Knowledge can be a burden.

If we’re going to do this ‘democracy’ thing, we need a law that says once you hold public office, anyone a single step away from you in your family tree is barred from holding office. We have enough qualified people we should not have anything that even smells like a dynasty.

They are nested concepts. Manipulation is a method of convincing. It is just convincing using surreptitious/covert means.

In the mind’s eye, an image forms. An alternate version of that segment from The Boondocks TV show.

A man pulls off his belt and raises it, standing over a small child. The child cowers. The man screams, ‘I am about to ruin your ability to trust anyone or love yourself, ever again!’ But then he stops, looks down at himself, and says ‘Oh, wait. That’s right. I’m straight. Come on, kid. Let’s go get ice cream.’