Rashav3rak [he/him, any]

  • 3 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2020

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  • Serious question: has American Dad been good at any point past its 9th or 10th season? I loved the show up until it moved to TBS, which is apparently around the time one of the showrunners left, but after that the quality drop was very noticeable. I think being on basic cable hurt them because they didn’t have to come up with creative ways to say obscene and vulgar things, they could just say the things. I think the censorship of network tv was making the show funnier.





  • To me, Biden seemed certain to lose, while with Kamala it could go either way. In no way is she a worse candidate than Biden. I think we should all be deeply invested in Kamala winning the election. Not because I want to see Trump lose, though I do. Not because I want to see Kamala win, which I don’t really. What I want, what I think we all want, is to see Hillary Clinton looking on as another woman becomes the first woman president. Not just that, I want to see Kamala win easily, just to make it clear to Hillary that she, personally, was the problem in 2016. No one thinks Kamala is an impressive candidate, so if her mediocre ass beats Trump with a comfortable margin, it’ll more or less settle the argument as to who was responsible for Trump’s victory.

    To be clear, I haven’t lost sight of the fact that a Harris presidency would basically just be the Biden presidency with more awkward laughter. We’re not going to get a good president this time around, or maybe ever. I’m aware that I’m doing something similar to the republican rank-and-file who know their candidates won’t do anything to help them, but will at least make the people they don’t like suffer. We should all be protesting, agitating, and organizing for something better, but with the understanding that organizing is almost certainly not getting us a better candidate this cycle, let’s try and find joy where we can. In this case, in schadenfreude.





  • I think demon-possession stuff can be scary, or at least upsetting. Not so much when horror comes from a possessed person like in The Exorcist, but more like when demons are toying with the minds of mortals, making them unable to trust their own senses. There’s a pretty-good movie no one saw called The Dark and the Wicked (not the greatest title imo) that does this pretty well. Is this person you just met real or was it actually the demon? Was it really them when you first met, and the demon the second time you met? Was it them or was it the demon when you spoke to them on the phone? Or did the demon make you think you were speaking to that person while you were actually speaking to someone else entirely? Were the words coming out of your mouth the same words you heard yourself say? Were you even speaking to anyone at all? It works because the horror comes less from a spooky monster who will kill you, and more from an inability to distinguish reality from illusion.

    In a similar vein, one thing I liked about Hereditary was how the demonic forces were establishing “rules” for the protagonist just to fuck with her. I love the bit when she tries to burn the journal and is set on fire herself. So later on when she tries to get her husband to burn the journal, expecting to burn to death along with it, you’re like “it’s going to turn out that whoever burns the journal also burns, so the husband is going to die.” But when he won’t do it she throws the journal in the fire in frustration and the husband goes up in flames anyway. There are no rules to this. There were never any rules. The demon was just playing with its food.

    So yeah, it’s my opinion that if satanic stuff can tap into fears about losing control and losing your mind, it can be pretty scary.




  • I got to do this once. I look like the type a prosecutor would probably want on a jury and I wasn’t individually asked any questions before being chosen. The case was a non-violent drug offense and it was a wild experience for reasons I won’t get into. Once we got in the jury room it pretty much went like:

    “Not guilty.”

    “Why not guilty? It’s a pretty clear cut case.”

    “I don’t believe the cops.”

    “Why don’t you believe the cops?”

    “I didn’t find their testimony credible. It didn’t convince me beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    “What about the body cam footage? Do you believe that?”

    “I didn’t find it convincing.”

    “The whole thing is on camera, do you think they faked it all?”

    “I suppose that’s a possibility. I just haven’t seen enough evidence to convict.”

    “What more evidence could you need?”

    “More than this. I’m not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    And around and around we went like that. I was the lone holdout. I have to say, the other jurors were pretty cool about it. Eventually we had to tell the judge we couldn’t reach a verdict on any of the charges and it was declared a mistrial. Totally worth it.


  • I want to work at the government Office of Whaddya-Need? where people come because they need help training their dog, or they need help moving across the country, or they need a leaking roof patched up, or they need someone to pick their kid up from soccer practice on Friday evenings, or they want to become a librarian and need career guidance, or they have limited mobility and just want someone to take them over to the lake and sit and chat. I want to be the person who helps to figure out how to get them the thing they need. For free of course, because it’s a communist utopia.








  • It’s especially weird that companies are still like this after seeing the success of a game like Baldurs Gate 3. The runaway hit of the year, and biggest earner on Steam, doesn’t even implement the basic Steam DRM. I tried it. The game launches and runs just fine when Steam isn’t running at all. It’s so messed up how capitalism leads to that (providing good products at fair prices and respecting your audience) being seen as an “unsustainable business model.”