Brian Duchnicki

[Supoko @Kaorumitsurugi]

THEY ARE CALLED HAIR VENTS
IT IS AN OJOU-SAMA LAUGH
THE OLDER HOT GIRL IS AN ONEE-SAN
SHO-TA LO-LI
IT IS NOT AN ANTENNA IT IS A AHOGE
WAIFU HUSBANDO
BITCHY GIRL IS TSUNDERE
WEABOO
ITS NOT TWINK ITS BISHONEN
saying tomboy is fine we’re fine with that one
DOUJINSHI
GET IT RIGHT

[jeremy @jeremylovesyall]

the one juror on the kirk trial who's gonna convince the other jurors that israel did it

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

I don't know who needs to hear this, but it might be everyone.

Sam Hyde is wrong.

He's worse than wrong. Fractally wrong. Wronger than wrong.

The kind of wrong you get when you understand who the enemy is, and are trying to fight against him, but you're really still fighting for him, because you have foolishly conceded his initial premise.

Sam Hyde doesn't know what happiness is. That's why he tells you not to have any. Because he doesn't know what it is and what it's for.

Know the difference between happiness and pleasure.

Happiness isn't sitting in a dark room jerking off to pictures while sucking on a lollipop.

Happiness is what you get when you connect to other people.

Happiness is what you get when you accomplish something you're proud of.

Carry that heavy burden across a finish line. Make something useful out of wood or metal. Fix that leaking window. Debug your code. Write something true, or beautiful, or both. Teach someone. Cook a delicious meal that doesn't come out of a box. Grow your small business. Raise your son to be a better man than you.

Do something others admire.

Do something that makes you proud.

Happiness isn't taking, or slacking off. Nothing you can buy can bring you happiness unless you add your own effort to it.

Happiness comes from making, and improving, and giving.

Happiness doesn't shun burdens. Happiness picks them up.

You are not made to suffer or to hate life. You are made to thrive, and to desire what makes you thrive. How could your ancestors have made it this far in any other way?

Yes, there are a lot of burdens you have to carry, especially right now. But don't carry them with worry and fear and suffering.

Carry them with pride.

Set them down across the finish line with joy.

And pick up the next one with hope.

Find someone to carry it with you.

When you know the difference between happiness and pleasure, your own mind, your own body, will tell you exactly what you need to do.

[さんそん ダイエット中年 @sanson_ganbaru]

OK、みんなの書き込みから感じたことをそのまま書くよ。多分ほとんど読んだはず。アメリカ人もイギリス人も両方怒るかもしれない。

まず、イギリス人は別にアメリカ人���向けて文句を言っているつもりはない。不平不満を言うのは彼らの娯楽で、別に解決策を求めてない。

一方でアメリカ人は非常に傲慢で優しい。そこに解決策があって、望めばすぐ実行できるにも関わらず実行しないことがとにかくムカつく。だからアドバイスをする。その底には、イギリスを好きな気持ちがある。好きだけど、最近の政治とか軍事とか色々不甲斐ないと思っている。頼れる同盟国であってほしいと思ってるんじゃないか。だからイギリス人が熱中症で死んでるとなったらアドバイスせずにはいられない。

でもイギリス人は解決しようと思ってないのでアドバイスしてくることにムカついてる。ムカつくので言い返す。アメリカは銃規制できてないから人がいっぱい死んでるとか、そもそも温暖化はアメリカがCO2いっぱい出すからだとか。

元々アメリカに向けて言ってなかったのに言い返すから、アメリカは議論が始まったと思ってしまう。（私が見る限り、アメリカ人は��論好きです）
そう��るともう地獄の言い合いだ。収拾がつかない。多分アメリカ人は無視されるのが一番効くはずだ。

アメリカ人もイギリス人は別に君達に向けて言ってないってことを自覚したほうがいい。俺も解決思考だからめちゃくちゃ気持ちは分かるが、自覚してみよう。

続く。

[Capn' Mordreds Emergency Commissions are open @ZloNoNameSov]

I had an idea that detectives/investigators/self made crime solvers should be scaled based on the evidence they use to bust the perp.

And while it works for a lot of them, it ignores the very important factor which is that they may be terrible at using said evidence.

[planefag @planefag]

As someone who's been writing military science-fiction for years, and have many friends in or formerly in the military (some of which are authors themselves,) I have something to say about this:

If all Yoshiyuki Tomino has to say with his art is that "war is bad," then he should stop making art, as he's only going to waste our time.

Any fool with two brain cells to rub together knows that war is ugly, brutal and costly. That doesn't mean war is pointless and should never be fought no matter the circumstances. In fact, such a statement is worse than pointless, as lethal conflict is a common constant of human civilization - and, for that matter, a constant among the vast majority of life existing on Earth, even between bacteria. If all your story does is shout "this is bad!" it's a childish lament that leaves a tremendous amount of this constant of human existence unexamined.

Who fights wars - the elites, like the ancient Greek Hoplites, or the knights of the middle ages, or the common men who volunteer, like in many modern nations? What do they fight for - for the ideals of their beloved nation, for honor and glory, or to save the women and children in the city that stands at their backs? What defines a good soldier? What defines a good leader? These questions are just as essential for us as they were for our forefathers, because the world is a tumultuous place full of evil people and great dangers and the time is coming, sooner than many may think, where wars between great powers will shake the foundations of the world and the lives of millions will hang in the balance. To explore questions like this, of such import to our souls, is one of the core reasons people tell stories to begin with.

And our tools and machines have always been essential to the conduct of war and the defense of all we hold dear. Men have told stories of talking swords or "tsukumogami" for as long as swords have existed; long before we could even conceptualize a thinking machine might be made with science; we dreamt of them existing through magic or spirit. Tools are what first brought us out of the trees to stride the earth as its masters; in the tools we shape and wield with our own hands we make manifest our intent, our will, our spirit. In the modern age, the vastness of our creations sometimes makes it easy to forget, but the human element is still the entire point.

I quote from page 71 of "Shattered Sword" by Johnathan Parshall and Anthony Tully: "The study of naval warfare (more than any other form of combat) holds the potential to completely subordinate the human element to the weapons themselves. Naval combat is conducted almost exclusively by means of machines – machines that are in many cases so huge and grand that they often seem to take on a life and personality of their own that transcend the tiny figures that inhabit them. Yet, in the final analysis, it is men who live in the ship, command and fight the ship, and often die in the ship. Their story, no matter how seemingly eclipsed by the great vessels they serve in, is still the fundamental story to be related.”

Its only natural we should be entranced with the great machines of war that we build, as they're the final product of the genius and labors of an entire society; fashioned into an incredible tool that is nothing if not wielded by the hand of a skilled warrior devoted to his craft and his mission. I know of not a single mecha story that runs afoul of Parshall and Tully's warning as quoted above; everyone seems to understand the assignment. The ones that don't are the likes of Tomino, or his fellow anti-war traveler Miyazaki. I can't understand a man who thinks fighter planes are beautiful but has little more to say about war than "it's bad;" he refuses to see that the beautiful form of a fighter plane follows its function, and that there's a savage, primal beauty in that function, like the fury that animates a thunderstorm. Or the fury and purpose that animate its pilot, for that matter.

Tomino seems to think that "nothing of substance is getting across." I disagree. I think the substance came across very well, and many in younger generations just think that substance is woefully lacking.

There's a cutscene in the Knights of the Old Republic, between Carth Onasi and Canderous, where Carth expounds on the difference between "soldiers" and "warriors," defining warriors as those who fight for plunder and the glory of conquest, and soldiers as those who fight to protect their nation and peoples - usually from warriors. He made a great point, but Canderous wasn't entirely wrong. As any fighter pilot can tell you, you need more than noble motivations to sacrifice and serve to be truly excellent - to overcome your enemy in an aerial duel, you need that urge to "lean in" to the fight; that competitive drive - a part of you needs to love the fight. Many soldiers over the ages have spoken of this; as Robert E. Lee said "it's well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it." It's that primal urge drawn straight from our deepest instincts; that thirst to compete and win, that gives soldiers the fire and fury to do their utmost in combat, to win the challenge, to defeat those who would plunder their temples, raze their cities and enslave their women and children.

That is the truth of war, every bit as much as the death and boredom and bloodshed and terror. And if you can only tell one half of that truth, because the other half doesn't align with your political or personal views, then I don't give a god damn what you have to say about it, or about the works of storytellers who do.

[AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem @AestheticGamer1]

(1/7) I'm not going to do a full trailer breakdown for Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, since we have an early form of the script you can place a lot of things with very little speculation, but want to talk about a few specific things.

Capcom production staff are confirmed to

[Ante D. Luvian @uncle_deluge]

In antiquity some of the most devout pagan philosophers, themselves initiated in the mysteries, theurgists, priests, attendants of Oracles, whose entire lives were devoted to their gods, would have told you quite strongly that the stories about them were allegorical, or encoded. That the anthropomorphic depictions, giving them petty motivations and flawed emotions were in error on one end and a condescension on the other. That they were intelligible principles manifesting in natural forces. That Helios was not literally riding a chariot across the sky but all the actions of the Sun were Helios made manifest, whom the Romans called Sol and the Egyptians Ra, multiple names for the same deity, the same force of nature, the same cosmic intelligence. That Athena was not born from the forehead of Zeus because Zeus was the rational ordering of the cosmos itself. The father of the gods because that cosmic order was applicable to every sphere of existence, from the heavens above, to the familial unit, wherein a father is the head of his household. To say they did not believe in their gods is categorically absurd.

You box me into a level of literalism not even the greatest pagans in history would have adhered to. The problem is that you and all the other peons I've had to deal with today have watched Disney's Hercules or Family Guy or Percy Jackson or read some bullshit by Neil Gaiman and think that the dominant mode of religious belief has cartoon characters in the clouds. Angry, bearded men with lightning bolts, and you must believe in one to the exclusion of the others. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about.

[IceFairy @richard_effendi]

It's important to note that doujin culture isn't "there's no copyright law". There are rules on how people are supposed to engage in it. There's a reason why Touhou is regarded as a unique exception among popular IP, rather than the norm. (1/?)

[『MrN I G T A S T R O MMan』 @TheStrxggler]

I have been saying this for YEARS ever since Game of Thrones brought this front and center.

It is just not mentally healthy that every media piece harps on how much life sucks and heroes don't matter.

This shouldn't be the norm.

[🇯🇵星空音夢🇯🇵🧀Cheese police 👮 @hoshizorarock]

アメリカ人達よ🇺🇸

桜を食べる鹿を見なさい

[Futsu @FutsuUT]

I'm Japanese. I’m not sure if this post will reach people overseas, but given the recent uproar over the official translation of UT, I feel that a misconception regarding the official JP translation has been spreading abroad. Therefore, I’d like to share my thoughts;

[Zack Morrison @ZackMorrison18]

*Jim Carey-Ace Venture big inhale*

Studios spent all of the 2010’s chasing Netflix’s streaming model b.c their shows were making quick, loud splashes. It was cheaper to make streaming due to new media contract rules, but they ignored how these shows don’t sell ads, forcing them

[Taylor Day @TABYTCHI]

𝕏 this weekend

[shira @shiraeis]

the part they left out: these dogs were stolen for the dog meat trade in Jilin, China. Jilin province has 50+ slaughterhouses.

they escaped from a moving truck, formed a defensive formation around an injured german shepherd, and a corgi navigated them 17km home over 2 days.

they were all neighborhood dogs who played together every day. they all made it back.

China still has no national ban on dog meat, but Shenzhen banned it in 2020.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Humans invented writing to track debts. The world's first writing system, cuneiform, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to record who owed what to whom. Clay tokens for accounting date back as far as 8000 BC. Debt isn't some corruption of a golden age. It's so fundamental to human cooperation that we created literacy because of it.

War is even older. At Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, archaeologists found a cemetery dating to 13,000 years ago where half the people buried had been killed by arrows, spears, and clubs. That's thousands of years before the first city, the first farm, or the first written law.

And about that beautiful planet of trees and sunshine: for most of human history, roughly half of all children died before age 15. Researchers who studied 17 hunter-gatherer societies found an average child mortality rate of 49%. Even in Sweden in the 1750s, 40% of children didn't survive to 15. Today globally, it's about 4%. In Japan and Iceland, 0.4%.

The systems the tweet mourns are the same ones that changed those numbers. In 1820, roughly 84% of all humans lived in extreme poverty (per economic historians at the University of Paris). Today it's about 10%. Between 1990 and 2025, roughly 118,000 people escaped extreme poverty every single day.

None of this means that debt or capitalism are without serious flaws. They obviously are. But the "paradise ruined" framing gets the history backwards. The planet was a place where burying your children was normal, and violence was a constant threat. Everything that makes modern life livable was built, imperfectly, by humans figuring out how to cooperate at scale.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Stop this.

Don't you understand?

They are not looking for sales. They do not want your approval. They hate you, and they want to humiliate and demoralize you so they can be socially ascendant and feel good and momentarily forget that they were weird theater kids in high school that no one liked.

And so they can pave the way for a communist revolution that they imagine will put the theater kids in charge.

In reality, they'll all be machine gunned into mass graves by thugs within the first 18 days after the fall of the old order, but they don't know that.

So every time they hollow out another franchise and wear it like a skinsuit, they don't care if you buy it.

They just want to hear you cry.

So if you tell them you don't like it, you won't buy it, you're very upset, then you might as well be giving them a smoothie and a handjob.

But you can't help it, though, can you? You see the death of your beloved Warcraft, your Star Wars, your Warhammer 40K, and you can't help but mourn.

You think something precious has been destroyed. You're sad for what might have been, but never will be.

You're wrong. You don't understand. You don't understand because you are an electrical engineer who designs high-voltage grid hardware, and reads and watches stories in his spare time.

You are not a professional maker of stories.

Well, I am. So I'm going to explain this to you.

Star Wars, Star Trek, Cowboy Bebop, Lord of the Rings, Warhammer40K... these aren't stories. They are story ideas.

And any professional author will tell you that ideas are the cheapest and easiest part of our whole job. That's not the hard part, or the part that requires talent and skill.

The real work in storytelling consists of turning that idea into a complete, satisfying story that is ready to publish and be read and loved.

I can come up with ten story ideas in ten minutes, but I dream of someday having enough control over my writing process to publish one good novel a year.

The reason you loved all these franchises is that they were a garment worn by good writers, who were able to make you love the characters and situations. Now they are a skinsuit worn by bad writers.

Good writers are always going to make stories you like, regardless of which characters and settings they use. Bad ones are always going to disappoint you, no matter which franchise you hand them the keys to.

If all the good writers are kicked out of Games Workshop, they still exist and can write good stuff. And if they are not kicked out, but merely disenfranchised and overruled by managerial theater kids, but they have to stay for a paycheck, then it's because YOU give more money to Games Workshop than you would to all the independent projects they could start.

You thinking you are fighting for the soul of Warhammer40K and Star Wars. But you are fighting against the people who own the copyrights, so you will always lose.

The best you could ever do is to kill the franchise by rallying the customer base to defect. And you can do that right now by giving your attention to storytellers who don't hate you, instead.

But you are attached to the familiar, to what you are used to instead of to what could be. So you follow franchises and intellectual properties instead of artists and writers.

And you get so mad that there won't be more Star Wars that you reward critics like @TheCriticalDri2 for his tenth angry rant about how Star Wars sucks now.

Sure, I could tell him to spend his time promoting good new stuff instead, but the only reason he is able to promote anything is because he has an audience, and you are that audience, and you are rewarding him for ragebaiting you, demanding that he ragebait you, because that's the only thing you tune in for.

That's why there are so few good writers in your field of view who are making good new stuff that you like. Because you've never heard of the ones that exist, and if they're not attached to one of your beloved franchises, they can't raise any money.

I would love to spend 100% of my working hours writing novels. I'd certainly finish them faster that way. But I can't. Because I have to be on Twitter most of the time, so I can pay my bills now.

And I'm considered one of the fortunate ones, because the time I spend on publicity actually earns me enough money to do that.

Most other authors, good storytellers who don't hate you, can't even quit their day jobs. Which means even less time and energy for creating.

I know you loved these franchises when they were alive. I did, too, some of them.

But you have to let them go. Because they are dead now.

They are still moving, but they are dead.

We're in the part of the zombie movie now where your son has succumbed to the infection, and you have him locked in the basement, feeding him raw meat while he lunges at the end of his chain, trying to devour your flesh.

You're just too attached to let go, hoping against hope that you can hang on until a cure is found, but there isn't a cure, there's never a cure, and that isn't your son. It's pure evil piloting the husk of his body.

The only thing left for him is a quick 5.56mm bullet in the head.

Do you doubt me? Do you think you can win against the copyright holders? Well, tell me then, when have you ever won one of these?

Name one franchise that fans have rescued.

Not rescued from financial cancellation, there are plenty of those, but name one that was rescued from woke infiltration, and brought back to its roots.

Well?

I'm waiting.

The truth is, wars are not won by being bold and resolute and surrendering no inch of ground. That's just a strategy for filling graveyards with your brothers. Wars are won by fighting the enemy where you are strong and he is weak.

If every one of you gave an independent author, or artist, or filmmaker, or developer, one tenth the time and money you spend on overpriced plastic army women made by neomarxist feminists who hate you, then a lot more of them would thrive, and there would be just as many new things for you to love are there were old ones.

You're not selfish, or short-sighted, or tight-fisted. You just loved too deeply, and you can't let go. But he who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in chains.

Stop stalking your crazy ex-girlfriend who got fat and hates you now.

There are younger, hotter, nicer women who would love to meet you.