This shit sucks. It'd be almost funny at this point if it weren't wearing away at my soul bit by bit. Still unemployed without having qualified for unemployment. I think I've already applied to pretty much everything I can reasonably get to by bus. Currently looking into temp agencies.

Anyway, not only am I now 25 dollars in the red, I needed to go grocery shopping and now I definitely can't. I'd very much appreciate it if any comrades with some cash to spare could help out.

I need 25 dollars to get my account out of the negative, and then another ~30 so I can run down to the store later today or tomorrow, but any amount is of great help! My cashapp and venmo accounts are both under the handle cosecantphi

EDIT: Goal reached! As always, thanks so much to our comrade donors and comrade bumpers here on c/mutual_aid. I hope my situation stabilizes soon so I can pay it forward.

The terrorists are entirely justified in their violent resistance against the obviously evil and genocidal Britannian empire, which is something of a stand in for both the British Empire and the US.

The annoying liberal deuteragonist bumbles around for 2/3 of the show being a supersoldier for the Britannian Empire while constantly making these bizarre self righteous arguments that Lelouch's rebellion is just too darn mean and violent, we have to support the Britannian Empire's rule of law just a while longer guys! The longer this goes on, the more and more his world view crumbles around him as basically nothing goes to plan for this liberal who is just incapable of grappling with material reality. He ends up following his sense of liberal morality all the way to accidentally killing millions with a Britannian wunderwaffe nuke. This leads him on his jokerification arc wherein he realizes the error of his ways and actually supports Lelouch through the batshit last few episodes of this show.

Anyway, I can't recommend this show to anyone in year of our lord 2024 because it's obnoxiously, embarrassingly horny in a very mid 2000s anime way, because that's exactly what it is. But I'm imagining what could have been.

Reposting my thread from yesterday about needing $65 to get my Buprenorphine prescription filled for the month. The goal is almost reached, I just need another $15, if any generous comrades want to help out with the last bit

My cashapp and venmo accounts are both under the handles cosecantphi.

EDIT: Goal reached! Big thanks to our very dedicated comrade bumpers and very generous comrade donors here on c/mutual_aid

HBO tried to make the line go up by cutting two episodes off the second season in the midst of the writer's strike. Like no exaggeration, the season 2 finale ends in a way that makes it immediately obvious two more episodes were supposed to exist. They were simply truncated along with the all the payoff for many of this season's character arcs and plot lines.

One of the writers even made a statement that an eight episode season wasn't their decision. Unfortunately the news of that must have hit them too late in production to fully accommodate that in the writing.

Except on all the subreddits for this show, the prevailing opinion amongst dipshit redditors is that the writers are cutting book events to make time for LGBTQ asoiaf fanfiction.

While that'd be based if true, it's not. Like wtf? Do these people live in a different universe? Are they watching a different dragon show? Redditors ain't alright, man. These people watch the enshittification of media in real time, and their lack of media literacy results in them going on queerphobic witch hunts and throwing wild assignment of blame at anything but HBO and capitalism.

I've been catching up with season 2 and honestly it's not half bad. It has cut out the worst shitty (often gross and misogynistic in nature) excesses of the original show while still retaining most if not all of the great character writing and great dialogue that the first four seasons of GoT had.

There's all this great early GoT style political intrigue retained to it as well. All of these lords and ladies and queens and kings are just terrible, awful people for most of the runtime while we've been getting increasing focus on how badly the very concept of monarchy forces the dirty laundry of one inbred family with pet nukes to take shape and brutalize not only the slowly starving smallfolk of King's Landing, but also the smallfolk throughout most of the surrounding empire.

The Lords of the Seven Kingdoms all exist in this web of familial ties that ensures their ultimate class solidarity, eventually dragging most of the continent into dragon war the aftermath of which resembles that of atomic bombs. Now we find two desperate peasants given dragons because Queen in Exile Rhaenyra needs to find someone capable of vibing with Vermithor and Silverwing, the second and third largest war dragons in existence. She ends up burning to death dozens of claimed Targaryen bastards to do this by locking them all in the Dragonmont and letting the dragons sort the rest. She watches this happen with bored disinterest, in contrast to the horror on her face when her highborn Queensguard Steffon Darklyn dies in a previous attempt to claim the dragon Seasmoke.

[Brief Spoilers for book events in this paragraph]

I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.

My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.

She regularly uses cannabis vape pods.

I had no idea she would explode on me about this because I had already previously told her I was using cannabis, that I was paying for it, and that it greatly helped me with my social anxiety and depression. It also was greatly aiding me in my weight loss, and I'm currently the healthiest I've ever felt in my life. So yesterday I started making my edibles like it was no big deal because I thought the heart to heart I had with her about it patched things up. I legitimately thought she'd be happy for me. Well the moment she smelled it in the oven, she stormed into the kitchen, suddenly she threatened to kick me out, threatened to stop paying for all medical care I'm currently receiving, and when I didn't give in, she started begging my elderly father to intervene, nearly gave my dad a heart attack the way she reacted to me consuming this plant like it was bloody murder. I had been open about this with him for months and he doesn't have a problem with it.

I was making edibles with preground weed because it's so much cheaper to buy, I picked up a couple eighths for $10. Apparently though my mom had never heard of the concept of baking weed in the oven to decarb it, and started screaming at me like I was insane. I'm thinking she thought that maybe smelling it might mean she's also smoking it, that's my speculation on why she reacted like this, anyway. I currently don't use any other drugs on a daily basis not prescribed to me by a doctor. Though seven years ago I had a problem with opiates that I've since solved with Buprenorphine maintenance, for context. Once I realized this might be about the smell I turned off the oven and put away the foil pouch of weed, but that wasn't enough.

She gave my dad an ultimatum to kick me out or she'd be calling the cops. I refused to stop using weed, I told her I'll avoid using cannabis when she's home like I had been doing previously, but I would not be sacrificing my mental health at her arbitrary whim. My dad started having a panic attack, got in his car, and drove away. The cops arrived, explained this wasn't their responsibility, and they left. I am very glad my dogs and I are still alive. I have autism and thought this might be the end of me.

My dad returned a few hours later. It is now the next day and no one has breathed a word of this since my little brother returned from work.

I see this discussion come up a lot and it always results in arguments that I think maybe come about as a result of a lack of agreed upon definitions for certain terms, so I'll start there. Here are some definitions that make sense to me surrounding the hard problem of consciousness, would love to hear if anyone else has had the same thoughts:

Subjective experience:
Essentially the range of qualia that I can say exists because I experience them. It's the information you receive from your senses that is not quantifiable. For example, a description of the color red, no matter how detailed and scientifically accurate, will ever allow a person who has never experienced sight to understand what the color red looks like.

The mind and body:
The physical apparatus through which animals like us interact with the world. From the body we receive the necessary sensory information and nourishment to exert our will on the world. With the mind we interpret all sensory information gathered from the world.

Vast neural networks read, interpret, alter and conduct data received from the body's various sensory organs. Our brains begin this process with inherited patterns of basic cognition. Certain neural pathways calcify from repeated activity, forming memories: a catalogue of previous experiences we attribute importance to. Memories, guided by our upbringing, form a scaffold with which personality forms around, totally unique to the circumstances of any individual. But at no point in this fundamentally material process do we see the necessity for qualia, subjective experience. Theoretically, would a fully accurate computer simulated brain not also experience qualia if we know for a fact that we do?

The ongoing process described above is how most people would describe consciousness. We find that messing with certain parts of the brain can interrupt consciousness, and therefore memory formation, but how can we be sure that some fundamental sensation never ends, totally divorced from the body and mind?

People who get too drunk may not remember it later, but they were certainly conscious at the time. If there exists some feeling before conception and after death, no one can know because the dead can't speak and the living don't remember it.

(Initially posted in c/drugs but thought it would get more engagement here)

I was thinking about the way cannabis is increasingly legal in the US, and I'm starting to see it as a symptom of balkanization in this country that might start to become the model for the legalization of other drugs.

To explain: In most places in the US it is either legal or de facto legal despite the fact that until this year it was federally considered a schedule I controlled substance alongside Heroin, LSD, and many other widely known recreational drugs. For decades the federal government considered cannabis to be wholly unsuitable for all medical use and too dangerous for scientists to even research. They dedicated vast resources into destroying cannabis farms and putting cannabis users, dealers, and growers into prison. It was in a legal category more severe than fentanyl and many of its analogues.

Without even changing those laws, we got to a place where most states decided to just hand out licenses to businesses to grow and sell it, and allow anyone over the age of 21 to buy it.

I think the research chemical scene has by now made it clear that recreational drugs are not a finite group. New drugs are invented all the time. In the same way, new plants containing psychoactive compounds are either discovered or popularized all the time. They do not necessarily start their lives in the public consciousness with stigma, and they can be just as benign or deadly, euphoric or dysphoric, sedating or stimulating, psychedelic or inebriating as any classic, widely known drug.

The way the federal government categorized drugs and the way the DEA enforced drug law was never rational when you approach it from the goal of reducing the harm drugs cause socially. In actuality it was always about maintaining a legal and socially acceptable avenue for continuing this country's legacy of racism and slavery.

What this means is that which new drugs are to be banned, which are to be ignored, and which are to be accepted is an entirely local matter determined by which marginalized communities can be connected to each drug for purpose of stigmatization. With increasing social disunity across the states, we might begin to see certain drugs became wide spread and tolerated in certain states but treated with extreme hostility elsewhere. A situation like this would paralyze the ability of the DEA to gain enough cooperation from local law enforcement to curtail production and distribution, leading to decrease in stigmatization and eventually the relaxation in attitudes even in places where the stigmatization began.

For purpose of discussion, assume that due to bad luck, this asteroid has evaded the detection of all amateur and professional astronomers until about six months from impact. The asteroid is too large to deflect with humanity's current spacefaring capabilities, and the general scientific consensus is that the impact will end all multicellular life on Earth.

What do those six months look like?

I started a new job at a whole new grocery store a couple months ago. Got hired as a cashier a little while before the grand opening, but my first weeks consisted entirely of stocking all the empty shelves. Then when we opened, it was a nightmare suddenly dealing with customers for the first time but I thought I adapted fairly quickly.

Next two weeks my hours dropped from 30 per week to just 15, but my boss went out of their way to let me know I'd be getting more hours next week, so I wasn't worried and considered it a fluke.

Of course the next schedule came out, and surprise: 0 hours for the entire week. Then my manager and boss both blatantly ignored all my attempts to talk about this on the stupid ass app we use for communication.

This happened to about 10 other coworkers too, and it clicked for me. It was just a fucking bait and switch to get some extra manual labor to get the store open sooner. Lure us in with promise of a long term job, and then throw us out like trash two months later when they're done with us.

Please, we need some more excuses for the lack of terror.

I step out of Hexbear and into another instance for once and immediately get this shit lmao

I was letting off some steam about how sick and tired I am about working a shit job to make some asshole rich, and I made an off hand remark about how my employer probably belongs in a gulag. Further down the reply chain, this lemmitor asshole shows up to send me a whole tirade full of faux concern, breaking out the psychoanalysis to say I'm just an extremist full of unjustified hatred because I must be a bitter loser. Somehow they come up with this nuclear hot take comparing my anger at the capitalist class to a Christian fundamentalist hating gay people.

But the fucking cherry on the top here is sending me this comment as their very first interaction with me and proceeding to instantly block me to deny me the chance to reply at all. I've seen others use the block feature as a means of getting the last word in, but never to get both the first and last word in at the same time. And in the end, this self-unaware lib ends up calling me the overly self righteous one. Perfect.

Tbh, what gets me is that they were so fucking close to getting it. They almost came to an accurate understanding of the fact that my material conditions as a poor person getting fucked over day in and day out by my employer stealing my labor will heavily inform my politics. But of course they never quite reach that point, instead bizarrely veering off into psychologizing me, and acting like this is all just some sort of character flaw on my part.

Rule one: https://hexbear.net/comment/4738025