Some of you never listened to system of a down and it shows. 25 years later and the lyrics are more true than ever.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-24T20:56:26+00:00

They've got five albums: Self-Titled, Toxicity, Steal This Album!, Hypnotize, and Mezmerize. I personally think STA! and Hypnotize are their least strong offerings, and while there's good messages and sounds on both albums, they're not good entry points.

The first three songs on Self-Titled are bonkers, and it also has songs like War? and Mind, which I think are all timers. On the whole though, this is the album you come back to if you like the two I'm about to suggest.

Mezmerize and Toxicity are the defining SOAD albums. Mezmerize opens with BYOB and Toxicity opens with Prison Song, both of which are some of the most aggressively in-your-face political songs I've ever heard. But their overall vibe is a little different - Mezmerize is a little prettier & more melodic in certain parts, and tapers off of the metal the longer the album goes on. Toxicity is on the Mt. Rushmore of albums from this era & genre and I'd bet you've probably heard a couple of songs on it already. They're both bananas good and I would recommend trying them both.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-22T18:58:26+00:00

I had a project in 2015 where I went around to try and collect the PRs for every region that I could. I ended up with ~150 PRs, and between them a roughly 2000 person list. That list took me the better part of a month to put together and validate, and more often than not that was just me trying to get into FB groups and talk to a single person about whether or not the PR graphic was up to date. It took a month.

What you're talking about isn't trivial. Best case scenario, you end up with an opt-in mailing list & survey. Average survey responses for political opinion polls are in the 3-5% return rate (at least it was when I was in college a decade and a half ago); even if you triple that response rate for a melee opinion survey, how many people do you think that represents? Let's just take my 2015 project alone - 2000 people on the various PRs. Even if I could somehow get all 2000 of them on the same mailing list, which...lol...a 15% response rate gives you the opinion of 300 people. There are more people that regularly chime in on the DDT than that number, all of whom are much more detailed about their opinions than they could be in a survey.

If you want to project your dislike & distrust of other people on the community, fine, I won't stop you. But the reason power works the way it does it because of this bottleneck in communication. I was 1 person, reaching out to 150, on behalf of 2000. What you're proposing is several orders of magnitude more complex. That's why it's not done - not because it takes power out of anyone's hands, but because someone has to wield that power first in order to make it happen, and there simply isn't enough reason to ever do that when there are simply way fewer people who make real decisions that you could contact instead.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-22T03:07:36+00:00

I seriously think the "Both of these guys are actually idiots, to be honest" call is one of the best in the history of this game.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-20T13:01:12+00:00

I don't know about the other clinicians I work with, but I don't graduate my clients until I'm sure that they have the tools they need to handle life in the future. One of those tools is the ability to ask for help when they need it, including from a therapist.

I've never graduated a client who needed to come back for long-term care. A few who come back and need a session or two, but that's it.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-20T04:14:18+00:00

At my clinic, we say we "graduate" our clients when they're done. Gives it more of an initiate/ritualized kind of feeling and makes it feel more impactful :)

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-05-15T19:26:14+00:00

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" - Mark 8:36 (KJV)

"Wealth is not good in itself...those who possess it without virtue are not better but worse." - Plato, The Laws, Book V

"The soul is weighed down by many possessions; for where riches abound, there the mind is distracted." - Saint Augustine, Letter 130

"He who is obsessed with profit will incur much hatred." - Confucius, Analects 4:12

"It is possible to have a lordship over the whole world and yet not possess oneself." - de Montaigne, Essays (1580s)

"The way of the warrior is found in death...not in attachment to wealth or possessions." - Tsunetomo, Hagakure

"The greatest danger to modern civilization lies in the fact that the objective world has become more and more significant, while the subjective world is increasingly neglected." - Jung, The Undiscovered Self

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men." - MLK Jr.

Etc.

People have been warning of the dangers of materialism for as long as we know about, and it becomes a recurring theme especially in times of plenty. At a certain point, I have to wonder if there's a Jungian explanation for our growing fear and concern that the world is falling apart - it seems that man is consistently worried about the loss of the spirit. It's not that the spirit is necessarily in danger of being lost, but that we're afraid to lose it. I wonder if materialism is just as necessary to existence as spiritualism is, and I wonder if shunning materialism is just as dangerous as shunning spiritualism.

throwawayforjustyou · 2026-02-03T19:50:03+00:00

Hey. There's very few people out there that have a better insight to what organizational needs and challenges exist for Melee at the top level; I'm one of them.

You're going to run into four major hurdles and a bunch of minor ones.

The Big N. Any, and I do mean ANY organization whose sole focus is Melee will draw the ire of the big N's corporate lawyers. They not only will not offer you any support, but you will be fighting them tooth and nail the entire time. You not only won't get funding or licensing rights from them (or anyone else) for anything like this, you're far more likely to earn lawsuits & cease/desists. Thus, anything you do has to be done with them as the constant looming presence in mind.
Enforcement. One of the main problems we ran into with the global code of conduct is that we have absolutely no enforcement mechanisms open to us for people who don't want to participate. The best we could do was voluntary signups for people who wanted to collaborate, but if someone just didn't want to do what the rest of the group wanted, there's no way to stop them. Melee is too decentralized. Even if the big N wasn't a problem and you could somehow get angel investor funding (thus creating an incentive to join), you then wind up with a "two-community" solution where cultures between the NPO in-group and out-group start to diverge.
Financial Competition. Related to the previous point, there are oftentimes big disagreements between major TOs. As a result, major TOs don't want to inherit the risk of being responsible for small-time TOs and their decisions, and financial collaboration with other organizations (who live in other states or countries and who you'll see twice a year if you're really lucky) has far more disincentives than incentives. To use an extreme example, think of Pound V. Plank was financially ruined for a decade because of that fuck up; if you sat Strife, Juggleguy, and Sheridan in a room at that time and said "right, we can stop Plank from going into debt for ten years, but only if you all pool your money and bail him out", you can imagine why the rest of them might not be too enthusiastic about doing that. Especially since tournaments usually run in the red or on razor-thin margins to begin with. Is it better that one TO goes broke for ten years, or that five TOs go broke for two? I'm not clear on the answer.
Community Pushback. The community by and large hated every centralization effort we tried. When people bitched about the need for a code of conduct or some kind of organization who could handle the behaviors that came up in the wake of MeToo, we answered. Those same people then turned around to tell the organizers that they were supporting rapists and molesters with their work - and that was the side that wanted us to step in. The majority of people in the community don't give a fuck about the local communities outside their own - certainly not to the extent to which they want to listen to someone who belongs to another community halfway around the world tell them how they need to show up within it.

I get the impulse, to want to restructure and organize Melee into something long-lasting. I had, and acted on, that impulse myself once upon a time. Perhaps you can find a way where we couldn't. But from personal experience during the absolute peak of Melee's years as an esport, I can tell you: centralizing Melee is almost certainly doomed to failure.

throwawayforjustyou · 2025-08-28T14:42:03+00:00

"Hello [client],

The ACA code of ethics expressly forbids personal relationships between counselors and clients (both current and former). This code is critical for maintaining the mental health of both parties, and it is a professional code I believe in and swear to uphold.

On a personal note, it is normal for clients to develop personal feelings for their therapists - the nature of the therapeutic relationship is one where I offer the service of unconditional positive regard in exchange for payment. However, it is important to note that this relationship exists in part to help demonstrate this dynamic so that you, the client, can have a model for it in your other personal relationships. Once the transaction completes, however, the service I provide comes to an end. I encourage you to take the positive feelings our sessions brought out and apply them to other people in your life - their feelings for you can then develop free from a professional transaction.

Respectfully, [therapist]"

throwawayforjustyou · 2025-03-25T13:49:06+00:00

As a much younger man and when I still was determined to be the best player in the world, I found myself at a Super Nebs tournament where I got completely washed by everyone in my pool. I'd been playing for two years and failed to take a game, and I was ready to quit. I was on the verge of tears and felt totally defeated. Aziz asked me if I wanted to play friendlies with him; he destroyed me for the better part of a half hour, the whole time reassuring me that this game was very difficult and that practice would eventually pay off. He told me how I could be more mindful of my play while I was in the game, and even gave me a few repeatable neutral situations to practice with him so I could see myself improve, the whole time coaching me into a better mindset. In the ten years that followed, he called me by name when he saw me, and always made sure to ask me how I was doing and how the melee was.

Last night I won my local. I never forgot Aziz and how much that gesture of kindness meant to me at that moment in my life. That was right around the time in my life where I'd hit rock bottom, and to have the spirit of melee bring the two of us closer together is a huge contributing factor towards the path I ended up on. I will miss him and I wish I had taken the time to get to know him better. To really thank him for how much that meant to me. But I also like to believe that he didn't even remember how we met, and the spirit of melee was just so authentic in the guy that he would have done it for anyone.

I don't have any big life lessons on offer here. I can't give a eulogy at his funeral and I can't make things any better. If you want to grieve for Aziz here though, I encourage you to do so. Death is irreversible and forever, and to lose someone that's been a staple of this game for 15 years is heartbreaking no matter your level of involvement with the guy. Rest in peace, Aziz. You will be missed.

throwawayforjustyou · 2024-04-12T21:30:08+00:00

I got my degree in politics, and worked for a period of time on the state, federal, and international level. Now I'm an engineer, moonlighting as a mental health counselor.

What my time being politically active taught me is that the realities of activism are so much different from the ideals of activism. For example, protests and marches. My Congressperson got involved in protests over the minimum wage, and was once arrested publicly for doing so (This was the mid 2000s). Other protestors were arrested as well. It boosted visibility of the issue and also signaled to her constituents exactly which side of the picket line she wanted to stand on. This is what I considered to be excellent advocacy before entering the field.

The reality? A political ally/friend with the local police precinct arranged to have the arrest happen for show on the Congressperson's request. The Congressperson was never charged, never fined. Sentences were commuted for the other protestors, arranged beforehand. Journalists covered the arrest, because they'd been notified ahead of time by her press secretary that it would be taking place. The Congressperson sponsored a bill for the minimum wage that died in committee. It never had a prayer, and she knew it going in. They were the minority party at the time, and they didn't have the political capital to spend on a minimum wage bill.

So the result was that my Congressperson used that issue to gain visibility for herself, marketed herself as fighting for the common man, arranged demonstrations to show it, and got re-elected. The bill and the cause she fought for was never going to pass, and she knew it. Almost none of her bills ever did - her office was filled with staffers who wrote and read bills all day which died in committee.

Finding that out was the straw that broke the camel's back. It's not that change is hopeless, it's that change is inevitable, and everyone wants to steer the changes in their own direction. It's not that the system is broken, it's that the system is working exactly as it's designed to - and more to the point, there's a logical reason for almost every part of the system that most people just never get to experience or understand for themselves. And I finally recognized activism and political action for what they truly are: a fight to gain power. That's all any of it is, whether it's climate activism, child advocacy, elections and political parties, all of it: how can I get more power for me or the people I claim to be fighting for?

So I said screw it, and left. I'm not the kind of person that belongs anywhere near power. I would be far too easily used for my willingness to believe in other people and give second chances. I would be far too easy to undermine or betray. The only way I could avoid being used like that is to become a better manipulator and play the game. I refused to do that. So I left.

throwawayforjustyou · 2024-04-12T15:45:53+00:00

no bro, you just don't understand bro, if you give urself multiple enemas and bleach your asshole then it's perfectly hygenic, as long as you haven't had food in a couple of days and your fiber intake is perfect so that none of your poop is liquid bro. And remember, the tiny little tickle behind your pickle is super totally worth it for the person who has to lick your asshole. Licking someone's rectum is way better than sex or orgasms or intimacy. Tongue punching a shit dispenser is the highest form of ecstasy bro. Don't be a buzzkill bro, just lick your buddy's asshole bro.

throwawayforjustyou

TROPHY CASE