RiotDoll

I guess I'm looking for myth that promotes communal ideas, relates to worker alienation, etc.? I think of the book of Acts in the bible, that's somewhere between an example of how christians are supposed to live and a defense of paul before he's executed, right? but incidentally the book has ideas that can be carried forward and developed into a marxist-friendly understanding of how to live, even if it's loaded in stuff a well read marxist would find objectionable, there will be no perfect examples and i find it tiresome to get lost in pedantry about it so spare me!!!

I also wanna write some. Like "hades began to push and proliferate communism because he was horrified by the trauma of the humans coming through his gates and despised our cruel fates" feels like a decent basis for a mythic story idk

look i dont wanna get into the relationship of myth and religion to marxism, not really, i just like writing fake myth and i need an idea of what's out there in order to make something worthy of the concept

It was as easy as reformatting a usb stick, changing the boot order and turning off bitlocker, which was on for some reason?? but i havent used linux since, i dunno Mandrake 10? I was a kid, and it has been ages. It changed to mandriva about a year or two after i bought their CD set.

anyway I'm decently competent at computers i guess? i occasionally do stuff in powershell on windows, and the terminal or w/e seems neat. I used to do more coding, a skill i refreshed and picked up during quarantine. I'm mostly familiar with Microsoft's .net stuff though.

i shoved vs code and some stuff on it, but like, what's needed to kind of, well, replace a windows desktop? I gave it a 300gb partition, which is 30% of my available space, so i need to use this thing.

I am mostly getting peeved as shit and annoyed by Microsoft's increasingly aggressive "we gotta force people to upgrade, gotta shove horseshit AI nonsense on our stuff, gotta re-enable ads on the desktop" bullshit. I even paid for windows 10 pro, this isn't a free license, and it's still a nightmare in this way and frankly i'm done. the appeal of starting with a fairly barebones OS (i'm aware i can go much more stripped down with OSes like this, not the point) is intense right now.

but i realize now i genuinely know jack shit about dick outside of microsoft and android environments and i want advice.

The laptop itself is mostly a niche use laptop, but while I'm not an advanced dork in these matters, i probably know enough to leverage it to replace windows if i can know what the strengths of this platform are, what the good software is for software development (is Code gonna be it?), whether Wine is still the emulation software of choice, that stuff.

One thing I'd really like to do is learn what the default install of Mint+Cinnamon is doing, how to go over the different components, how to pick and choose what i want this thing doing. I didn't find the official documentation overly helpful, troubleshooting the install aside, so i wanted to ask here

If i can get there, and get some windows based software running that I need, i'll ditch the windows partition entirely, and i'd like to get there.

like, how do you really approach the average american and just like, empathetically convey that they need to raze this fucking barn

i mean especially the groups out there who historically had some level of buy-in to the system and are in denial about their exclusion - like what is the metaphorical eye-piece nada can force onto their eyes to see the basic truth: we gonna have to do something unpleasant to change this sitch

Is it because he's always nailing smug weirdo rich fuckbags? Is it the peter falk hard carry? Is it because despite being canonically a cop he does anything but act like a cop?

Is everything downstream of columbo an attempt to erase his legacy as the hound of wealthy sociopaths?

Is Columbo a demigod?

I've had a love of history generally, and I know a bit more than most about the Roman empire, and that's kind of a red flag i guess, but I genuinely think they're one of the worst things to ever happen to the world, much as i find the endless stream of civil wars and coups to be very fun to read, the brutality of their empire wouldn't be surpassed until England somehow went from a backwater to a globe spanning empire and to be quite honest i'm not a fan of them except as a gateway to knowing what some of my ancestors got up to.

Weird Ass Rome Guys are why the American feds are the way they are, it's obvious there is something deeply wrong with how Rome gets portrayed in popular media and stuff that makes this a seemingly wide-spread phenomenon, but honestly what's with the glorification of Rome? is it downstream of American Nationalism? No, that can't be, because Rome Guys go back so far we have popes making fake roman states and tsars and sultans trying to prove their dick is the most Roman. It's hard to miss a lot of Rome Guys are pretty regressive people. Like, you don't ever think something like "Augustus was a role model" unless you've got some twisted bullshit shit going on in your heart.

It makes me uncomfortable to engage with the history sometimes, because Rome Guys are always listening and ready to project their noble fantasy of them and the idiot narratives of Rome's decline as a sickness caused by foreign invaders sure does sound like deeply right wing revisionist history to me, but I've never really thought through the how and why of these guys, i wanted to solicit Hexbear's thoughts.

I have a few wilting veggies left, and some carbs (rice mostly) - but I really need to go to the grocery store. I need protein, I need to get cat litter if I can raise enough, too. My snap benefits ended last month. I live in the PNW, and everything is way too fucking expensive. I feel weird asking for $50 when I know it's gonna buy me a few days of food tops, but yeah here I am, hat in hand again.

If you can help, bless and thank you.

Venmo is @KTKatte, I have other cash handles, but you'll need to PM me for them.

Thanks again.

i'm on medicaid, but basically nowhere accepts my eye coverage. i've spent a few weeks looking, because my glasses are currently failing more and more by the day and slipping out of useability (the right lens' bottom support snapped out and the rest of the frame is getting worse and worse at fighting gravity)

I am extremely farsighted, and without my glasses, most daily tasks are an impossible blur.

I haven't had my eyes examined in years, but I can re-buy the pair I've had since 2020 for just north of $75 on zenni, and that's probably what i'm gonna have to do if I can raise the funds.

I've been living off donations for a while now, so if anybody can help, you'd save my ability to do basically anything. It'd be much appreciated.

The amount has been received. thank you!!!!!!!

hey so, i'm a transfemme, i have trouble getting work on a good day. It's july, and I need any financial help that can be spared. I've been out of work a while. I get interviews, at a rate of about 2 a month, with daily applications over several apps and honest to got footwork and old school physical applications.

It has never been this hard to get a job, my physical body hasn't changed, my demeanor is what it always has been, but these interviews go nowhere. There is never followup. I am never selected to move forward.

It's extremely demoralizing, and I've more or less exhausted the good will (and economic ability) of my family and friends after needing help for this long. I'm embarassed. Capitalism expects us to work, and I'm even willing, but the work isn't coming and I guess to most people it starts to seem like a personal issue. Maybe it is? But I'm genuinely trying everything I can, and I'm still on the fucking precipice.

phone is $80, i need at least $50 on electric, but the entire bill is $300 rn. I can go without cable, but that's another $100 to keep on

If you can help, it would mean a lot. I can't reasonably expect anything, but I have to try.

venmo is @ktkatte, pm me for any other apps

Thanks for anything. Love you all.

First of all, I wasn't really a big kojima gal? I had played the first and a bit of the fifth MGS until earlier this year, where i finally finished MGS V

i realized it is an extremely precient and political game, and I think i like kojima's brand of crazy.

So then I read about death stranding. I saw the promo footage years ago, and it followed that cutscene where Deadman finds himself on that combat beach, and I assumed it was more action heavy bs that I was growing out of (hormones change your tastes what can i say), so i completely ignored it until i grabbed it on a whim recently

and anyway, WOW! so I fucking love this game. Everything is so weird. Astrology and esoterica are canon, everything is a fucking insane metaphor for something else, the world has been utterly bent the fuck over by cataclysm, and you're just a dude out there with your artificial womb, making deliveries and linking up the remnants of humanity.

I love the vibe of these little communities and holdout preppers coming together, sharing what they have to move forward into a post-cataclysmic future. I love all the stupid shit with Lockne & Malingen, I love the bridge babies, i love that one of the most potent weapons in the game is made by running around until you're so tired you piss blood, and that bloody piss gets turned into a grenade. I love having weaponized body fluids. This shit owns.

I'm not even sure death stranding 2 can live up to this.

also the multiplayer features can be a bit much (I have it set up to log in offline and to not automatically share structures because people will just spam structures in the most annoying fucking places, but they're also awesome.

I love how much cooperation and community effort is the front and foremost thing, to the point it's literally one of the stats the game tracks.

Sorry, I needed to gush about how rad this game is, years after its heyday

edit: Also if anybody is currently playing and wants to form strand contracts, i'm on the Steam PC version. I'd rather see like, specific people's stuff in my game world than like, random people's.

Right now i use strand contracts with inactive friends to sort of make it less likely i get six bridges in a forest when i go online, but i'd actually enjoy building the world map out with some people. Not gonna put my steam id out in public though, pm me for all that

a caveat that maybe state and municipal government is still somewhat democratically functional, like at that low level enough of the day to day of administering people's lives is delegated to actual democratic authority maybe

but then i look at stuff like the debate (i didn't actually watch the debate i respect myself too much) and i look at how stuff happens and how it like doesn't seem to matter at all who is in power for the average person. Like it's pretty obvious that there is corporate and wealth buy-in for domestic policy, and think tanks and stuff that set a social agenda to some degree, and I guess the democratic apparatus serves to enable that buy-in, but on the federal level it really feels like voting happens at all merely to provide a democratic legitimacy to stuff that's actually decided entirely by unelected bureaucrats and moneyed interests that are either employed by the state or privately, right?

everything connected to voting is there to give social consent right? if you vote you assent to the legitimacy of the government - and this is like, its sole function? because if not enough people did that, and people actually didn't believe in the legitimacy of the government, there might actually be a problem I guess?

Like how can we think it actually matters which of these guys [the goo brain prez candidates] ends up elected from the pov of an average person? womens and queer rights are dissolving before our eyes regardless in most places, labor rights movements get stomped the fuck out the second they start to do anything interesting, and the few state bastions of safety come from the fact that local governments still sometimes represent citizen priority in some limited sense.

like foreign policy is gonna be the exact same in most cases, like there's no voting mechanism that will end the genocide in gaza - there's no mechanism to get the MIC to stop bombing random places and sending demonic spec ops raids wherever, nor will the steady stream of funds that go into toppling any government that so much as hesitates in its fealty to the us - so ideas that democracy is the answer is meaningfuly deluded, right?

federal politics feels like a really boring kind of WWE thing where the stage are national elections and their personalities and horse races, the kayfabe is the idea that a vote translates into anything meaningful other than the governed consenting to the process, whereas WWE's actual function as entertainment and a RNC pipeline is somewhat obvious, liberals are an entire class of people who actually stake their identity on its sincere legitimacy.

I know this post is long and probably sucks, but this all reeks to me and I'm so tired of seeing people care when the actual options for positive change are narrow, unpleasant, and sometimes illegal to voice.

I want people to disengage, start building parallel structures and outright refusing to live as if this farce is legitimate and even if i'm wrong about the particulars, that feels unreproachably noble and needed.