ObamaSama [he/him]

That’s fuckin sick, came out great! The pattern itself looks incredible but the ravens are

I would not have been able to hold back laughter at my own joke there, props to you for not giggling uncontrollably after dropping that banger

“Inveterate repugnancy” is a banger, it’s so nice to see anyone calling it like it actually is. Juche gang stays winning despite the great satan’s best efforts

Lib armchair experts thinking that sternly shaking their heads is going to accomplish anything was funny the first time around but it’s genuinely just depressing now

Real. I always knew my music tastes were pretty out there but getting no results for several dozen of the artists and songs I know best was rough. I would enjoy karaoke much more if I could do anything other than stumble through pop songs I half remember from cultural osmosis

Japan is still Wakanda for white people but I think the sustained ridicule of weebs over the past decade or two has contributed to a sharp decline in Ken-Sama types. That and the huge boost in tourism in the past few years have made it much less of a mysterious, “exotic” place, a lot more people have firsthand experience that it’s a normal country with normal people like any other.

After I moved out from a place I was renting with my ex last year I crunched some numbers and realized that it’s cheaper to travel around the world and stay in a mix of hostels/long term stay airbnbs/share houses than it would be to rent a place by myself in a MCOL area while paying for a car. It’s absolutely fucking criminal how much price gouging there is in the US, I’m currently paying ~700 USD/mo for a cozy apartment in downtown Kyoto. It’s clean, quiet, safe, and I have literally everything I could ever need within a 20 minute walk. I don’t think anything comparable even exists in the US but the closest is likely downtown NYC/Boston for $3000+ a month while that same price might get you a place in bumfuck nowhere, North Dakota where a car is absolutely required.

So all of that is to say, OP, get the fuck out of the US if you can.

I got banned from twitter simply for having the Hezbollah flag as my pfp. I never posted on the account and set the pic over ten years ago, tried logging in ~3 years ago and saw I was perma banned for “TOS violations” lmao. Meanwhile I can’t get the other account I made as a dumbass high schooler with my real name and pictures taken down despite dozens of requests

Lost Highway goes hard, just watched it last night to kick off a lynch marathon. Had a really lovely discussion with my partner about how the possessive behaviors inculcated by patriarchal society almost inevitably lead to male violence towards women and other men. Probably one of Lynch’s most explicitly feminist films, Alice’s final line “you’ll never have me” goes hard as fuck

Waking up and panicking for a solid minute wondering where my gf is before remembering she left me last night 🤠

Know your limits fren but also gravity ain’t shit. Dangling your feet off a thousand foot drop is the same as a ten foot drop in terms of likelihood of falling. Wear good shoes and take great pics

I think you’re doing the right thing, my partner is doing the same for me and has been telling me to focus on just Mandarin for now instead of flip flopping between it and Japanese like I have been for the past year (despite currently living together in japan). I find switching my brain to anything but English results in them all swirling around together so I currently have a weird mix of Korean, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin to cycle through when I try to think of something in another language. Definitely not the most efficient way of doing things so I need to focus on one at a time, sounds like your partner learns the same way. Obviously it’s more fun to learn and practice with your partner but think of it this way: once she masters German your Mandarin will be good enough that you can help teach her and practice conversation together while knowing enough to correct common mistakes!

Gotta love it when your partner always tells you to open up more and then gets the ick when you actually do

Is anyone aware of a mandarin version of the book? I wasn’t able to find anything on Google and it doesn’t seem like there’s an “official” translation out there

Man I’ve been in Japan for months and have yet to see a single MGS related thing, very sad. Meanwhile evangelion posters and figures are everywhere and I hear cruel angel’s thesis at least once a week. I thought MGS was pretty big but maybe just in the west? I even went to a paremovedo parlor hoping to find the fabled MGS3 paremovedo machine, no luck

Three of my buddies there are saying it’s a complete nothing burger as far as affecting everyday life, “martial law” here does not mean the military shutting anything down. Just some internal power struggles that somehow scapegoat the DPRK?

Finished the book earlier today, lot to process and think through. It’s a similar feeling to reading Kapital where everything suddenly just clicks and the entire world is recontextualized in a way that makes so much more sense. I didn’t realize how deep the patriarchal brain worms go, the book does a great job of getting you to look back at your childhood and see the ways you’ve been conditioned from day one. I’m still making connections between a lot of different thoughts, feelings, and formative experiences, everything really goes back to the same place. I didn’t realize that I have so much deeply ingrained misogyny to excise, so many ways my behavior and thinking is molded by adhering to a patriarchal ideal.

I hope to get my thoughts together and contribute more to further discussion threads, I’m just immensely grateful to everyone here that recommended this book! I’ve already started pushing it on everyone I know that I think would be even slightly receptive, it’s such a good introduction to feminist ideas. Begged my girlfriend to read it to no avail, really hoping I can get her to eventually as I’m not nearly as eloquent as bell hooks. Also doesn’t help that I can’t even try to describe some of the things mentioned without tearing up. I feel like this book perfectly describes the alienation I’ve felt from being with women that ask me to open up and then ignore me/get upset when I actually do. Fingers crossed it goes differently this time, I’ve already spoken very frankly about suicidal ideation and depression with her. Cried in her arms before we even officially started to date so if that didn’t scare her off hopefully some theory won’t

The anecdote about your daughter is so cute, brought a tear to my eye. So nice to hear a way you were able to create a situation for love and affection to be shown instead of simply being upset and forcing your will on her

I have to preface this by saying that, while being generally aware of feminist concepts and terms, I have not really read any explicitly feminist theory. I always got the impression that it was not “for me” as it came from a place so removed from my own lived experience, often with no regard for it or outright contempt and hostility. I could engage with and understand how damaging and oppressive patriarchal structures are to women and queer people but didn’t fully grasp just how much it impacts me as a cishet man. I realize that it’s lazy and incredibly self centered to not engage more deeply on subjects that are not directly relevant to me as a person but can’t deny that I struggle to get deeply invested in theory I don’t find some emotional resonance in. If I only engage with something on a purely intellectual level without being able to apply it to lived experiences and critically examine the way those concepts interact with some baseline that’s more intimately familiar it tends to fall flat.

All of that is to say that I’m coming into this book pretty blind so I’m being totally mind blown by concepts that are likely already well trodden for many here. I have a lot more thoughts I’d like to share but feel I should probably just re read the first two chapters again to fine tune them to the actual text rather than going off on an excited but uninformed tangent

Listen to literally anything but top 40 then? I have almost exclusively listened to whacky obscure shit on soundcloud for the past decade, there’s so much creative and fun stuff dropping every single day. There are so many vibrant and unique scenes across the world, kinda wild to limit yourself to the most popular American stuff. You can absolutely find something you vibe with, just takes a modicum of effort to find things that aren’t heavily marketed and constantly shoved in your face. Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and drop any preconceptions of what music “should” be and you’ll have a much better time