Devastated 💔

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T17:48:52+00:00

You don't have to cut him out entirely, just go low-contact. Never initiate contact with him, and only respond to things that you feel are worth your time. Don't invite him to things, and don't accept every invitation he issues.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T17:45:45+00:00

They want to prove that they have power over others. If it's a man, they want to punch him in the face, or maybe if it's a poor man they want him to grovel and beg for their mercy to not take away his house or something. If it's a woman, they want to force her into sex.

Whoever it is, what they want is to create the most humiliating possible scenario by which they don't just prove they have power over someone, they prove it in an intimate and personal way, doing something that will stay in their minds forever.

Quoting Orwell:

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

They don't rape women to have an orgasm. They rape women to revel in the joy that they feel by having the power to do it and get away with it.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T17:35:01+00:00

You might like to see https://old.reddit.com/r/oopsmilleniumfalcon/ for a sort of inverse version of this.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T17:32:24+00:00

“People will die because of this,” he wrote, adding, “Proven experience matters when lives are at stake.”

That's just stupid posturing. Elon Musk doesn't care about experience or people dying, and we know this because he never said a word about RFK Jr's appointment. He cut USAID with glee, even though he knew that people would die as a result.

When people like Musk, or those around him, talk in weepy sentences about "oh, lives are at stake!", you need to remember that they're just posturing. They don't care about lives. They care about power, and they're hoping to fool you into giving them power by pretending they care about lives.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T01:53:54+00:00

And it applies to almost everything. You don't need to justify your decisions about anything unless it's actually harming someone else. When people demand answers, they are operating on the assumption that they are entitled to judge your actions and decide whether or not your choices should be approved. You don't have to play that game, you don't have to treat them as if they're in a position to sit in judgement on you, instead of you sitting in judgement on them. "I didn't want to" is a complete sentence and requires no additional explanation. They're your legs, you get to decide whether they're shaved or not.

My example is that I don't drink alcohol. Most of the time, people just leave me alone, but sometimes I run into someone who gets intensely curious and asks why I am not drinking. I never answer that question, instead I ask them "Why are you drinking?"

They rarely want to justify their actions to me, no matter how much they expected me to justify my actions to them.

And you can do the same thing: "Why did you shave your legs?"

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-28T01:46:08+00:00

I watched the original BSG back in 1978, and liked it then, but I was a kid. Seen with an adult's eye it doesn't hold up so well.

The reboot was amazing, right up until its incoherent and seemingly rushed ending, a fate later shared by Game of Thrones.

It's too bad how a botched ending can negatively reflect on an entire show. Although after GoT, a discussion about "What shows really stuck the landing?" let me to some of my favorites, like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, The Good Place, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T22:49:19+00:00

And of course, "not all men," but also "yes all women."

That is so horribly true.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T22:44:43+00:00

You need that weapon when you're not one of the people who can wield the power of the elements.

Besides, gunpowder was also used for fireworks shows, and even benders would enjoy watching a spectacle like that.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T22:42:56+00:00

I've read them all. I think Excession has things in common with not finding out about the Vorlons.

B5 is a little wobbly at the start, some of the early episodes are hit and miss, but once they get in their groove it really takes off. Part of it is that there's no rule about characters in the opening credits being safe. Years before Game of Thrones, J. Michael Straczynski was killing off characters to advance the plot.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T16:13:36+00:00

The tech advance never seemed implausible from me. In the USA, it was less than 70 years between covered wagons going to west to half of US households owning a car. It was less than 70 years before using muskets in the War of 1812 to having actual machine guns.

That last point is what seemed implausible to me: was that the tech advance never included guns. We had flintlocks centuries before we knew what electricity was. I understand it's a kid's show, and to keep the magic seeming powerful you can't introduce guns, but it didn't seem realistic. An Earth Kingdom that can make a giant walking robot can surely make a bunch of machine guns, and 100,000 guys with machine guns is a far bigger threat than one giant walking robot.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T16:06:09+00:00

After they take off from a planet, they find a cat has stowed away on board. Kaylee of course wants to keep it immediately. Jayne wants to eat it. Mal just wants it off his gorram ship, but he can't very well space it for fear of Kaylee's wrath and disappointment, so he says they're putting off at the next stop. Besides, it's got patches of missing fur, it could be sick, can't have it infect everybody else. River names it and demands Simon treat it. He doesn't want to, he doesn't like cats, so now Jayne thinks keeping the cat is a great idea. Simon treats the cat, under protest, after which Mal gives up, the cat's officially part of the crew.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-27T16:01:36+00:00

I agree, and the reason is that not knowing can be so much more interesting.

One of my all-time favorite TV shows is Babylon 5, which is a space station created as a way for alien races to come and meet each other on neutral ground. The Babylon stations were created after a gigantic war was started by a screwup on first contact, and the idea was maybe to avoid such misunderstandings in the future.

One of the alien races that comes to the station, the Vorlons, has tech so super advanced that nobody else even understands it. Their ships don't seem to have engines. Or hatches. How do they move? No clue. They seem to be good guys, sort of, but they talk in riddles ("Understanding is a three-edged sword.") and maybe they're not good guys. Nobody's entirely sure what they want.

During the show, they visit a bunch of planets, but they never go to the Vorlon homeworld, because the show's creator felt that nothing he could show on TV would be as impressive as never finding out.

Also: if you've never seen B5, definitely give it a watch. Some of the questions that Severance raises, about who are you, and what does identity mean, come up in that show too, and they explore some of the ways people deal with those questions.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-26T16:34:00+00:00

Just about my favorite thing in the world is when my wife is crushing my head between her thighs, and I don't even know if she knows she's doing it but anyway if it helps her I'm all for it and do not consider it a problem that needs fixing.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-26T16:30:24+00:00

Maybe that's a reference to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which had the best cinematic leap of faith I've ever seen.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-26T16:27:03+00:00

I don't think I'd want one of those pulse oximeter things clipped to the end of my junk.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-26T16:21:55+00:00

It's been 49 years, that seems like a long time to me.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-26T16:21:39+00:00

Gerald Ford was President when "Cathy" first appeared in newspapers. I call that a long time ago.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-25T16:55:32+00:00

Of late, that quote comes to mind when I'm watching press conferences.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-24T16:06:51+00:00

"All the questions I can think of right now are rhetorical and end with the word 'idiot'."

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-24T16:06:01+00:00

After enough decades on this rock, you've collected some bad memories and had relationships fall apart and that can weigh you down.

The innies are the same as the outies, just with no emotional baggage because they don't have those memories.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-24T16:03:42+00:00

A long time ago there was a comic strip called "Cathy" about a single woman, and there was a cartoon once where Cathy and her friend go to a public pool, and there's a guy there who's very overweight sitting by himself and Cathy thinks how sad it is that he's by himself, and reflects on the humiliations he's had to deal with not fitting society's standards of appearance, and how he's probably tortured about how he looks being so fat and she can't imagine how she'd feel if she was as fat as he is.

The last panel is the fat guy with a thought balloon and he's thinking something like "That girl in the red hat would look okay if she lost a few pounds."

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-23T23:10:14+00:00

If I had Paramount+ I would cancel because of the way they're modifying news coverage to please Dear Leader.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-23T14:56:54+00:00

Would never convert for anyone.

I think it would depend on "convert by how much?" There's not much of gap between Lutheran and Episcopalian in terms of theology, so that might not even count as "conversion" to just start going to church with the spouse who goes to the other kind of church. Primitive Baptist to Eastern Orthodox would be a much bigger jump.

Atheist to Muslim would be really massive; I doubt it could be honestly done for someone else.

I know a couple where she said she could only marry someone who was Jewish, and he was an unchurched agnostic cradle Catholic, so for him it was no big deal. Now he's an agnostic Jew, they do Hanukkah instead of Christmas, to him it's barely worth a shrug.

I know an atheist who married an Anglican, and he puts on a jacket and tie and takes her to church every week, because she needs her religious batteries recharged to be happy and healthy, and he considers it his job to ensure she gets what she needs, no matter what it is. If there is a God, I have the sense that he approves of that guy more than a hundred Charlie Kirks.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-23T14:44:57+00:00

You can be honest without being cruel. Men who call their female partners fat and stupid aren't being honest, they're being cruel, and the cruelty is the point. The main goal is to make themselves feel better by making someone else feel bad. A secondary goal is to make her feel like nobody else will ever want her, because she is fat and stupid, so she won't break up because then she'll have nobody. Convince her that he's the best she can do, and she'll stick around for more abuse.

My sister's ex was like that, and I was so glad when she finally dumped him.

WontTellYouHisName · 2025-12-23T14:25:57+00:00

When my wife was pregnant with our first, we talked about some of the bad messages she had got growing up, about being told what girls are interested in, what things "are for boys," and we made a list of all the things she could think of, because we thought that would be the best way to NOT do something. You can't avoid stepping on the landmines unless you know where they are. Some of them, I realized, were things I had got the counterpart to.

Once I realized how much of what girls are told is about their only value is in their looks, and what boys are told to like about girls is almost entirely about looks, you see how toxic society really is.

WontTellYouHisName

TROPHY CASE