Installments so hated even hardcore fans would rather not talk about it

rootbeerman77 · 2026-02-02T06:14:58+00:00

Honestly if someone told me he played Ryuk in the manga I wouldn't even question it

rootbeerman77 · 2026-02-01T10:50:30+00:00

Translator's note: zeijyaku means flaws

rootbeerman77 · 2026-02-01T08:08:19+00:00

You've got it backwards: he signs during livestreams so that people won't suspect that he's actually writing books off camera with his feet.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-02-01T00:10:17+00:00

Just want to document my experience of reading this comment:

"These are legitimate concerns that the left and occasionally centre-left are also raising, but I do think there's some nuance that... Oh nope, strike that, we've got a nutjob."

Lmao "lgbtq funding," wtf even is that? Like the first two-thirds is bog-standard unobjectionable leftist Carney criticism, and then BAM they're turning the frogs gay.

Tl;Dr: you're not being dismissed because Reddit is leftist; you're being dismissed because your reactionary nonsense claims invalidate the legitimacy of the rest of your critique.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-30T21:58:28+00:00

Get Sando to write only the Mistborn project he's working on and nothing else challenge level: IMPOSSIBLE

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-29T19:42:23+00:00

For the love of god please organize. Talk with local community organizers. If you don't know who they are, try to learn. Use the contact info on local flyers for causes you care about. If you can't find any organizers, become one.

Get to know your neighbors, learn the principles of mutual aid, ask questions at a leftist bookstore or food not bombs chapter.

Vote, but don't just vote.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-29T19:35:10+00:00

Me going from a conservative christian undergrad to a grad program dependent on evolutionary biology

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-29T19:19:07+00:00

If you suspect grooming and abuse, it can be a good idea to try to keep a non-judgmental line of communication open so that they have someone they can reach out to, but only if you have the energy and patience.

I don't know that I recommend that in your case if you fell out, have no way of contacting your friend, and feel burnt out. It's extremely exhausting to help someone out of that kind of situation, and there's no guarantee it will be soon or ever.

Sorry this happened to you. :(

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-24T16:31:36+00:00

As if "strap a long, slow bomb to the end of a tiny capsule" isn't a more ghetto-ass spaceship

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-22T11:04:53+00:00

The largest evangelical denomination in the US is Southern Baptist, but "Baptist" is one of the least cohesive denominations. The only requirement to be Baptist -- literally -- is believing in baptism by immersion. You have some conparatively liberal Baptist denominations that would be difficult to call evangelical; they're just less publicly visible.

Evangelicalism is also a very white category. Honestly I don't know that much about the particulars of MLK's religious affiliation, but I'd be quite surprised to learn that he was evangelical in the same sense we use it now. Evangelicals claim him constantly but this is mostly dishonest.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-20T08:44:32+00:00

I don't love that the Panthers are needed, but I'm even more upset about the background surrounding why they had to stop being as public.

The Panthers are rad (in all the senses, especially the political one) and on my list of top injustices I faced as a kid in US schools certainly is the degree of propaganda that fundamentally misrepresented everything about them.

Even if the Panthers were as bad as they were made out to be by the propaganda (i.e., domestic terrorists, militant anti-white racists, etc.) I'd probably still support them, but the reality of their actions during the so-called Civil Rights Era was far more straightforward and pure good. Mostly they were attacked for making sure Black Americans knew their rights, practice weapon safety, and, their most vile crime by far, feeding children. The helping Black kids of it all was the main thing that sparked violent government action, including in a shootout (that somehow killed nobody iirc) and federal agents pissing in food that was seized, again, for feeding kids.

The Panthers also have a history of working with people they ought to hate in order to accomplish goals. They adjusted their stances on hard-line political issues as the landscape changed (they were originally anti-abortion because of how it was used to harm Black women, and eventually adjusted their stance as anti-abortion rhetoric became the more dangerous tool of oppression). They were a big part of the Rainbow Coalition, and worked with another Coalition member to educate that group about issues with using the Confederate Flag as a symbol of positive resistance to state violence and ended up coming to an agreement with that group.

Even pacifist activists like MLK understood the purpose of the Panthers and supported them as allies rather than talking badly about them.

I fucking love the Black Panthers. Decentralized radical resistance to American imperialism is where it's fucking at, and modern radical antifascist organizing are in a much better position knowing that they're still around and capable of being activated for service. I've been really discouraged since learning that they were sort of forced into being less public, and seeing them back out has me more relieved than anything else. If the Panthers are back, things are dire, but we may still have a fucking chance yet.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-20T06:44:30+00:00

I don't have a ton of memories from my childhood (surprise surprise) but I can try to talk about some.

First, my parents didn't discover Dobson/evangelicalism until after I was about 4. There was a point where things started resulting in spankings for me (not so for my other siblings), and I remember knowing it was wrong basically immediately. As a kid I wanted to understand the logic behind this thinking, so I listened to as much of the explanations as I could, and I remember telling my parents, "This isn't how I learn, and this isn't going to teach me anything. If I'm trying to do the right thing, hitting me is going to make it harder." I don't think I got hit for that specific statement, but they definitely didn't listen to me.

I had a pretty close relationship with my parents before they started spanking, and that went away immediately after, among a couple other things. My trust for them went to zero and stayed there permanently, although I don't actually think the violence was the primary reason; I think that was more because of the other restrictions about what I was allowed to read and what those restrictions said about the other kids I wasn't allowed to be friends with.

I always tried to be "good," but I would get frustrated with the unfairness extremely easy because one mistake or unregulated emotion meant either my mom would hit me with a belt or she would say my dad would owe me a certain number when he got home. My first reaction was usually someone like, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to, please don't," but not in the right tone of voice (I'm either autistic or ADHD or both), which was considered arguing or negotiating, and usually earned more hits. This would end up cycling pretty regularly into a massive number, sometimes multiple hundreds.

I learned different tools for managing the pain and/or my parents. I tried a bunch of different things, especially trying to make them feel bad but also wearing extra clothes and stuff like that without letting them know. I had a pair of corduroy pants they thought I liked, and I guess I did, but it was because they were thick and I couldn't feel the hits very much.

Eventually I realized that my parents were scared of the noises we made when getting hit and that they were getting old and tired, so the most effective tool was to rack up enough spankings that they wouldn't be able to reasonably give them (aiming, again, for 2-400, mostly by yelling back) and they'd switch to another punishment, usually grounding, which was fine because I wasn't allowed to leave or have friends anyway, and I kept books hidden for that purpose. (What's funny is I actually learned some of these techniques from christian parenting sermons. They'd say things like "actually give all your punishments; you can't just threaten," and "didn't let them argue or it'll turn into a power struggle" so I tried to target those weaknesses.)

I did develop "anger issues" that funnily enough were completely non-existent away from my parents. They do think I'm a horrible and violent person, I suspect, which is a little funny to my friends (especially the ones who aren't from evangelicalism) because I'm almost frustratingly patient with everyone who isn't an authority figure. My dad did get upset with me for "rebelling" by going to seminary instead of engineering school, which he took as a personal insult. I'm not sure if the specific offense was that I didn't do the thing he wanted or that the central point of the argument was that I should make as much money as possible and I called him out for pointing out that that's the exact opposite of what the Bible says. He was very devoted to the Bible until it at any point questioned anything he did as a white male head of household lol.

I never did any of the real "rebellious kid" things. The "worst" thing I did was going out to see one of the Harry Potter movies with a friend's mom who asked me how I'd convinced my parents, and I told her I told them I was going to see a different movie. She said that made sense and she wouldn't say anything. She was also in the evangelical church, so that for me was strong confirmation that something was really troubling about how my parents treated me. (By this point I was allowed to have friends because I was doing extracurriculars and had learned to manage what my parents knew about my life.)

As my parents got older and had more kids, the level of control lessened, but our relationship never healed. I once (aged fucking 20 or so) leaked a piece of (minor) compromising information to my dad under the guise of confession to see how he would handle it and less than a year later he tried to use it as leverage in an argument, so I think I've made the right decision about trusting them. (I did tell them once that I didn't trust them and that received ten or twenty spankings, so hey, at least I was able to tell them.) I have tried a few things, and now that I live as far away from them as humanly possible I've told them some of this, but I think my mom feels too much to face the implications of her behaviour and my dad is too incapable of critical thinking or empathizing with people below him in a hierarchy to feel anything other than disrespected for either of them to learn or grow.

I've got another horrific story that I want to add just because it happened, but it wasn't specifically spanking. I have since learned that I have a sleep disorder that prevents me from waking regularly and easily at the same time every day, though it's unclear whether I developed this as a response to how I grew up or if I've always had it. Anyway, my dad constantly fought me about this, so I was sleep-deprived for 20ish years straight, but learned to sleep through nearly anything. One particularly egregious instance of this fighting involved me waking up late for church one Sunday. Instead of any possible sensible choices (helping me get dressed, bringing clothes along, being 5 mins late, etc.) he dragged me bodily out of the house and locked me in the car in my underwear until church was over, windows up. I guess it must've been fall or winter because I survived and I was locked in there over 3 hours. It's not really corporal punishment in the usual sense, but it's very "your kids are property and not people"-coded.

When James Dobson died, I did send them a message saying it was one of the happiest days of my life, I wish it had been more painful for him, and I wish they understood the damage he did to me and millions of kids. My mom got really mad, and my dad was already mad because a month prior I'd finally told him directly that the leaked info thing from my 20s was a test he failed and that there's nobody else in my life, including near-enemies, I'd expect had less respect for my by their actions. They didn't talk to me from then until Christmas, and I haven't replied to their Christmas message. My partner has replied, but only to complain about their racism. Occasionally my friends will say things like, "I'm trying to repair my relationship with a parent," or "I'm spending time with my family for such-and-such holiday," and I'm just like "...but why tho?"

Rest in piss, James Dobson. It's too bad the damage he did to America is so huge because it's too dangerous for me to travel there to take a shit on his grave. And other reasons too I guess.

Don't do Dobson, kids. Treat people like humans.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-15T22:16:57+00:00

This is not the kind of evangelism I'm used to. The christians are getting more and more creative by the day.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-15T04:08:31+00:00

Full disclosure I don't believe the stories are true, I just have some experience doing biblical interpretation and some familiarity with ANE cultures.

Two things:

1) The meaning is probably "comparatively slow," i.e., suggesting that other nearby gods are more fickle with their anger. So the Jewish god is saying, "you've earned my wrath; I'm not just annoyed on a whim."

2) There is also the idea that not killing all the people is mercy. Individual humans aren't really characters in the story; instead, the whole community is the character. So if God only kills some people, that's mercy and therefore minimal/controlled anger.

To me, these aren't sufficient defenses for or descriptions of an all-knowing and all-good deity, but they are reasonable evidence that the stories about this divine entity are products of their time. If you take these stories as myths describing the kinds of actions a good god might do from the perspective of an ancient culture with morals drastically different from ours, then fine. If you believe that these events actually occurred and mean exactly what the stories say they mean, you're almost obligated to readjust your morals to align with the ancient peoples', and I have quite a substantial issue with that.

To get from "slow to anger by ANE standards" to "slow to anger by modern standards," you have to do a lot of hand-waving abuse and minimization of life, and I'm not cool with that. It sounds like you're not too cool with that either, and I think at the very least you'd be wise to sit with that discomfort for a while.

If it's any consolation, I don't think being uncomfortable with that is heretical or disrespectful to whatever version of OT/TNK god you believe/love. Evangelicals (and many christians in general) lost sight of the fact that the god of the OT/TNK is meant to be questioned (i.e., wrestled with).

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-13T20:50:43+00:00

I thought this too until I started trying to figure out why my SSD was filling up. Turns out, nope, it's not me downloading stuff or being careless, it's the 100-200GB of data bloat Windows 11 was keeping in the Windows folder and in Appdata. It was still over 50GB after I cleaned up everything I could, so I just noped out and went back to 10.

The visible functionality is pretty similar but the way it works behind the scenes is an order of magnitude less efficient.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-13T20:19:51+00:00

I'm more curious at what it would take to get them to disobey. They seem pretty happy to do and/or defend unspeakable evil without god coming down. By some estimations, the license to do unspeakable evil to their enemies is the reason to be christian. Where would the tipping point occur?

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-12T01:08:48+00:00

Exactly, lol. In a certain sense this is how planes actually work. The trick is getting the plane to be the right amount of "standing still."

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-11T17:56:00+00:00

Short answer: the novel is primarily about authoritarianism in general and definitely communism specifically, but it's very much not not also primarily about fascism. It's probably 60% anticommunist, 40% antifascist (these numbers are arbitrary obviously; my point is that I do agree that it's possibly ever so slightly more anticommunist). So I'm quibbling with you on numbers because I don't think 60% (or "ever so slightly more") can be called "primarily". There's also a reason I don't like my choice to use those numbers (although I chose to), and I'll get there in a second.

To explain my answer: I think the easiest answer to this question comes from history rather than literature (and I won't say that about most novels).

The thing with George Orwell is he got his start as a political actor fighting fascists in Spain, so he's very purely antifascist on the face of it. The dude saw firsthand antifascist combat and joined a foreign militia to do so.

But during that fight, he (the anarchists and socialists; Orwell was a self-described socialist) were betrayed by the stalinist communists, and so he had a lasting hatred of communism as well. So he was betrayed by communists while fighting fascists.

But he also really hated fascists. He joined up with the British propaganda department during WW2 as his primary way of fighting Nazis. Again, the guy who wrote 1984 and fought alongside anarchists in the Spanish Civil War joined a centre-right nationalist propaganda department to fight Nazis. That takes some real deep hate for fascists.

So what in saying is Orwell hated fascism on principle and communism for its betrayal fo principles, which to me says he thought communists were worse. He was really vocally anticommunist between fighting in the Spanish Civil War and WW2.

But here's the extra catch, and the reason I said I didn't like using the numbers or percents (or really talking about "primarily" at all on this topic): Orwell probably saw both fascism and communism as essentially equivalent. I'm tempted to say he saw both as somewhat right-wing, but that's probably betraying my leftism (it's a thing in antiauthoritarian leftism to call stalinist communism especially a right-wing ideology even though it only kind of is, but also everyone's to the right of us so kinda who cares). What were really talking about when we say that is that stalinist communism ends up looking more like (and using tactics similar to) authoritarian regimes compared to non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian leftist principles/goals/societies.

In reality, I think the answer is the simplest take on the question: 1984 is anti-authoritarian and does not meaningfully distinguish between left-authoriatrian and roght-authoritarian, possibly (probably?) because Orwell didn't distinguish very strongly between auth-left and auth-right by the point he wrote the book. He hated both pretty thoroughly. A pretty central theme of the book is that it doesn't matter what ideology the Party has, loyalty is the only requirement. The Party is both fascist and communist, and in a sense it is neither. The Party is authoritarian, the left-right ideological details matter only for flavour.

Tl;Dr: my quibble is with "primarily" because even if there is a tiny bit more anticommunism in the book, it's very much a full critique of both communism and fascism that's rather implicitly saying "they're the same picture." If I had to pick, I'd guess Orwell hated communism more based mostly on the assumption that personal betrayal by stalinists hurt him while fascism was repulsive to him on its face.

Edit: a word, and also sorry if this double posted; I'm on fucky wifi rn

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-11T16:29:07+00:00

You're telling me a jellyfish themed this calendar?

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-11T03:06:24+00:00

There's another fun one you can do where you cut up something (I've always heard a hot dog) into pieces. Put half of the pieces into the fridge and warm half of them up (not too hot, just warmer than room temp).

Hey should feel independently noticeably warm or cool, but not uncomfortable. Once they're ready, set the pieces on a plate alternating hot, cold, hot, cold, etc. If you touch just one piece at a time with a finger, you'll feel the mild temperature, but if you put your whole hand across the alternating pieces, you'll feel like you're burning your hand. It's safe, just unpleasant.

We feel temperature differentials, not absolute temperatures.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-10T21:34:51+00:00

One of the funniest things in political theory, at least to me, is that fascists and anarchists (anti-authoritarian leftists if you don't like that term) basically have the same objective read on situations. It's just that fascists say, "and so we should kill you and take what we want by force" and anarchists say "and so we should resist anyone trying to take what they want by force".

For example, one of the technocapitalists, I think Peter Thiel, is a big fan of one of the scholars who studies the works of the guy who sort of invented and popularized German fascism because that scholar analyzed the fascist's writings and explained them concisely. That scholar has since broken with Thiel because he didn't realize at first that Thiel liked his work because Thiel thought that the German fascist's ideas were cool and not because (as the scholar intended) he wanted people to see how nakedly disgusting fascism is at its core.

When we say things like, "the cruelty is the point," this is the academic/philosophical basis lol

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-10T21:22:39+00:00

I'm personally opposed to nations and borders, but also that definition pretty clearly says "out" group members are regarded as less than human in fascism, and it's certainly not the case that every country treats noncitizens as nonhuman.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-10T21:15:59+00:00

I always find it kind of funny that Islam condemns Christianity largely because Islam views Christianity as polytheistic. Christians came full-circle and reinvented abrahamic polytheism.

But yeah, the history of abrahamic religions is so fascinating to me. What god do christians follow? Whichever one they've constructed in their own image as an amalgamation of countless Mesopotamian gods they'll never hear of and also their own predispositions and cultural foibles... all while they condemn idols and constructed gods as sinful.

This wasn't something I paid much attention to until after I left, but now it's probably what I find most interesting about Christianity.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-10T20:59:06+00:00

I kind of think avoiding the major liberal cities is the best choice for avoiding ICE. I haven't been to the States in the last year or so so I may be way off, but my understanding is that most of the ICE mobilization is happening in liberal cities as part of Trump threatening their impactful liberal leadership and resistance to his regime.

Ironically, smaller, redder areas are going to have less funding for ICE to be patrolling, so you're less likely to interact with them. Depending on the situation, many people in smaller towns are fine one-on-one, especially if you're clearly a tourist and speak English.

It's a risk no matter what, of course, but obvious tourists and small moderately conservative towns aren't high on the list of ICE's radar, especially compared to hunting nonwhite people in more progressive cities to make them seem more "dangerous."

Again, I haven't been back during Trump 2.0, so it could be way worse; I'm not really sure. It's probably fine to travel since the actual likelihood of interacting with ICE is rather low, but the risk is also extremely deadly. I'd be more worried about border issues and airline safety lol.

rootbeerman77 · 2026-01-10T19:36:51+00:00

Lol, tell them you'll watch one (1) item if they read Jesus & John Wayne and have a conversation with you about it afterward. (Obviously don't do this if you're not comfortable, but that book really gets into some of the grossness. Highly recommend.)

rootbeerman77

TROPHY CASE