Comradeship // Freechat

Yesterday, my buddy Max passed away.

Max was an unrelenting floodlight in the ocean of unfathomable darkness that is life. He would wag his tail, non-stop, when he would see you. I am not a writer or anything but it's safe to say that Max was too good for this world. Everyday I feel shame that I cannot bring about any change that would have made this cradle more deserving of him.

Max had limitless energy. I am not kidding when I say this. He loved to play fetch and I would get tired of throwing the ball at full force before he would get tired of bringing it back to me.

He always seemed extremely healthy. If he was not so goofy he would probably have been the most handsome dog you have ever seen. But he was all kindness and no ego or pretense.

Recently his health started deteriorating and it turned out he was suffering from cancer. We could have never imagined since he seemed so upbeat but it had advanced beyond intervention. From our estimates he had been burndede by it for about two years but it never showed. Treatment was tried but was found extremely wanting. In the end we had to say goodbye to Max.

I will miss you buddy.

The dishwasher wasn't rinsing properly. I found a bottle of what I thought said "dishwasher cleaner" under the sink, so I put that in the dishwasher, on a hot cycle. Well, I am partially sighted and turns out I misread the bottle. It was actually washing machine cleaner. After several cycles I managed to get rid of the suds, but not the smell. The dishwasher smells terribly of laundry detergent. And it's strongly clinging to the glasses and dishes, making them unusable. I tried putting vinegar in, but it didn't get rid of the smell. I am worried about my landlady's reaction when she finds out. She is already at the end of her tether with me because I am several months behind on the rent. She has spoken before about evicting me due to the money - I'm worried this might be the final straw. what can I do to get rid of the smell?

So, I've been playing cyberpunk 2077 and terra Invicta recently and there's just a couple things that consistently bug me. Now look, I'm not expecting them to be fair to China and the DPRK and Cuba and what not. If I did then I wouldn't be able to enjoy anything ever in this world. But then there's other things that just make me believe that Johne Locke rose from his grave to write some code for these games.

For cyberpunk 2077, it's the police. Apparently, literally 9/10 cops you meet are "the last honest cop in Night city." After the fifth time hearing this exact line I almost think there's some inside joke I'm not getting. Sure youre told the ncpd is corrupt sometimes (maybe), and in their little "safe and sound" show, the ncpd says cops may ask for bribes and that you should give them bribes. But like, that's never shown. The cops you do see are

Detective who wants to get to the bottom of hard cases the brass doesn't want solved, and to save his nephew from a serial killer

Two police officers who are definitely good and who just want to help their friend Barry, who's sad his turtle died and who is angry at the brass for covering things up

Cop who sacrifices his life in order to steal life saving medical equipment from arasaka, who only procures stolen cars for the corrupt brass

Cop who does what the brass tells him to do in order to protect himself and his daughter

[Edit was wrong on this one, didnt know there were different choices for this mission and that hes actually not a good cop. My bad.] Detective who hires you to steal bd scrolls so he doesn't have to go through the trouble of getting warrants

cop who beats you for stealing a car from a corpo, but disobeys orders from said corpo and spares you from death

You get the point. It's classic COD levels of writing for these guys. "All the problems are caused by the corrupt management and bureaucracy all the cops are really good guys at heart." Have you ever met cops? Like sure, I'm not saying literally 100% of them are sociopathic serial killers(although i think you have to be a little fucked in the head to do what they do), but the police department doesn't attract the type of people who want to help the community. It's literally almost as bad (or hell, I'd say maybe worse in some respects) than literal Dick Wolfe tier cop shows. And it doesn't help that the game is constantly telling you "man the ncpd are some bad guys. The ncpd are just another gang. The ncpd work with Tyger claws" etc. I wouldn't be as critical if my ears weren't hearing one thing and my eyes were seeing another. (Note:To be...too fair, there are essentially corpo cops who do actually get the treatment they deserve. People like Reed and Takemura aren't bad people on a personal level, but they're beholden to the interests of their capitalists and so you end up at odds with them because they do their dirty work. I don't think theres enough questioning of Reeds "for muh country" shit, but at the very least he's not given a free pass like the ncpd is. Same with Takemura, although it's never really shown how bad he can be really, opposed to just not liking Yorinobu.)

Terra Invicta is comparably smaller, but I hate their democracy vs totalitarianism crap. Looking around at the starting scores it's literally like those freedom institute maps.

Cuba, with direct democracy, free elections, accountable representatives, etc.

Grrr totalitarian nightmare

Thailand, the US, etc.

Aww, flawed democracies are still democracies

But then you look some more and it just has you asking if these people researched 5 minutes of political science before making some decisions. Like, really, south korea and Japan are "full democracies." One is a corrupt hellhole ran by megacorps who can raid and persecute anyone deemed helping North korea, and the other literally has a system to make getting rid of their one party dominance near impossible. At least give them the flawed democracy tag if it's so hard to understand anything else.

It's like, I really do enjoy playing both of these games but those two things are just constantly in the back of my mind saying "these people aren't as intelligent as you think"

Or being competitive. Or business. Maybe all three. I can be professional in a workplace, when I actually manage to get into one. I can work hard. But the process of finding work is soul-sucking. The work itself, even if theoretically meaningful in a vacuum, can still be part of a soul-sucking process. The ever-changing landscape and "I got mine" rat race to stay above the water and "get yours" depresses, rather than motivates, me.

I don't want to be a personal brand, I want to be a person. I don't want to sell things, I want to build things. I don't want to profit off of people, I want to help people.

And sure, some of these things aren't always mutually exclusive. But when they are, capitalism makes sure you suffer for it. Chip away at your humanity or lose out on stability. Angst of the soul or angst of the stomach. Neither makes you a happy, healthy human being.

I try to be patient with it. Take it one day at a time. Work toward a goal. Improve on myself. For what world? What future? One with rising sea levels? Burning forests? While capitalists chill on yachts?

I know it isn't hopeless. In my heart and mind, I know that it isn't. But capitalism makes it feel hopeless. Trying to work within that framework often feels pointless when it doesn't feel painful.

The healthier I become, the more clear it becomes how sick capitalism is. Capitalism depends on you turning the blame inward. But when you start to address some of your legitimate problems, it becomes evident that the poison of capitalism is still there and has not changed.

You can't appeal to the goodwill of capitalism because it has none. You can't reform it because it has no interest in being anything less than what it is; in a word, exploitation.

Of course there are the day to day realities to contend with. There are the processes to contend with. There is the science of socialism to contend with. You can't upend it through willpower. But it still sucks to suck at it or to have the soul sucked out of you by it.

It doesn't make you an idealist to want to be human. It doesn't make you a utopian dreamer to want to share instead of hoard. And it doesn't make you a dictator to want to end exploitation. Your communal ancestors would be stunned to see the chains you walk with daily and the gears that you turn, so that machines thousands of miles away can do more wanton destruction.

You're incredibly normal in history to be disgusted with what you're a part of, it being the system of exploitation, domination, and destruction that it is. That's a consolation. You're about as opposite as alone in this as you can be. No matter how bad it gets, remember that they'd be by your side if they were still here. The majority of humans, who lived in communal styles and mostly worked together in shared interests. No matter how it ends, that's what you're a part of, to be human. Not this fleeting soul-sucking system of exploitation and colonization.

Bring it back into being in every way that you can. Shared humanity, through the struggle for liberation. I don't know what way the arc of the universe bends. But the arc of the Earth bends toward where we collectively bend it with what is there to bend, inside and out. Move through the shifting contradictions. And create the world that we need.

i couldn't find a community geared towards venting or posting about depression, so i'm coming here to empty my head. sorry in advance if this doesn't fit the comm well. if you're sensitive to depression i'd avoid my post tbh.

it took me two months to find a job since my last one ended in October. my bills became unmanageable during that time and my phone was shut off. yesterday, on my first day of work, my car was repossessed after i got home. i live with my partner and his mother and they fought about me the other day. i came home early today from work and got into a yelling match with my partner over something stupid. we have been together for 13 years. we know there will be bad and good times, but lately it's been nothing but bad, and i am the cause of a good percentage of it.

i have several mental illnesses that make it difficult for me to maintain support for myself. i am medicated and have been in and out of therapy. i've even been hospitalized for suicidal ideation. i am trying, i really am. i don't know how to balance the love i feel for my partner and "being responsible" financially. we are supposed to focus on expenses and bills first, but i cannot simply exist to work. that isn't life, that isn't living, i'd rather be dead. i will only get one life to live and i am spending it concerned about money and successfully navigating a capitalist hellhole. yes, sometimes i buy my boyfriend and i shit we don't need, but it's because we get to experience each other genuinely when we come together and do or use whatever i bought for us. i am creating memories, i am creating happiness.. but yes, it is at the expense of money and "good" decision making. poor people are allowed to enjoy life too.

but.. i don't know if my boyfriend sees it that way. he's told me that he cares more about being financially stable and secure, but the smile on his face when i get him something he wanted or i pick up some weed for us to relax together and smoke tells me that he needs a release too. he feels pressured to conform to the world around him, but he is also extremely disgusted by our world in much the same way i am.

idk. i have felt like a leech and a failure my whole life, and now i have lost my phone and my car, and have no money until my first check. i spent what i had on gas for a car that was taken from me lol. now i'm sitting here broke and without much of anything, and my boyfriend and his mother seem to think poor of me as of late.

i'm tried. i really am exhausted. if i don't wake up tomorrow the world would be doing me a favor. i have begged to die in my sleep before only to unfortunately wake up and be forced to exist yet again. maybe tonight will be different.

For a long time, I was trying to be ambivalent. I thought "AI is a fad, it'll blow over" and I bore through all the pictures clogging up my favorite art websites but the recent explosion in popularity of AI videos as "memes" on Twitter and YouTube has finally flipped me. This shit sucks.

I don't even know what kind of people are into these things. Have you tried watching an AI video? They're very creepy. The characters within look and move very unnaturally. I can't watch them because I keep thinking it's going to explode into gore and viscera like The Thing. This is an asshole thing to say but people who produce those things have earned my harshest judgement.

And the worst part is that one day very soon, this technology is going to used to start making videos of people commiting crimes. Sickos have already used it to homemake CP, it's not going to stop there. I wonder if this is what it was like to live in the Terminator universe when Skynet was starting to be developed. It's very obvious that this problem is only going to escalate, millions of people are calling for regulation or rules, but the scumbags engineering the tech remain anonymous and completely unhindered in their efforts.

I was looking through people's opinions on Star Wars books/comic books on Reddit. For comic books someone suggested the Darth Vader comics. I read through the first few chapters and it's just him being an idiot and manipulated by Palpatine, slaughtering his own troops and then committing atrocities on non-combatants. Does it get any better? He is gonna remain the bad guy until the end so I am not sure what the value is in reading this. Sounds like it's made for Star Wars wehraboos.

For books some people suggested the trilogy about Thrawn. I know nothing about him except he is a villain too so I am not optimistic about that either. Haven't started reading it yet.

شالوم و مرحبا لجميع رفاق وأصدقاء

عندي كان شعور حزينة مؤخرا جدا مع حياتي وما هي يحدث ، حياتي لم تعد كما كانت ، لقد حدث الكثير ، خسرت أصدقاء ، خسرت أحبائي ، فقدت أناسا عظماء طوال هذه الأشهر ، جميعهم في ألم ووحدة ، هزمتهم الحياة نفسها بكل ما فيها ، لم أحظ بطفولة رائعة ولا حياة طيبة ، كلها مليئة بالمشقة والكفاح والدموع والدماء ، ما أعرفه هو أنني لا أتمنى سوء حظي لألد أعدائي . ما مررت به وما زلت أمر به حتى اليوم ، لا أتمناه لأحد ... حسنا ، أتمنى حقا الأفضل للجميع هناك ، من أعماق قلبي ، أنا آمل لكم جميعا عاما جديدا سعيدا وصحيا .

كثير من السلام والمحبة .

أنا سارحل ، ولكن ليس إلى الأبد . 🫡❤️🫂

Optional: bricks your computer when you do it

Why is there no country where you have more terminating-road-priority intersections as opposed to continuing-road-priority intersections?

Example of terminating road priority: Road A terminates at an intersection with Road B. Road B has to yield to vehicles turning onto Road B (especially cross-lane turns)

Background: The subreddit for information about Luigi Mangione, the Insurance CEO deleter, got banned by reddit admin bootlickers. A replacement was made.

I escaped the Reddit regime a little while ago. I consider myself a marxist-leninist-MZT. Vegetarian and vegan for a few years. I've a lot of thoughts on how marxism and veganism are connected. Never wrote them down. I'd like to start smth like a club for marxist vegans to develop our own proletarian theory. Most vegan theory I found is either openly bourgeois (Francione is a literal TERF) or revisionist (anti-China, anarchist, libertarian). How about fixing this?

I came across news that a startup I had never heard about failed and became insolvent. I went to its "About Us" page and there I see this:

And? Are you gonna do anything about that?

Is this a Canadian thing?

Good riddance to 2024, I gotta say,
hopefully 2025 will be more gay.
  I toast with a pint of dark beer
  and thank you all for the last year
as today happens to be my cakeday.

🥳

i think i am late idfk

I'm leaving soon at around January 2nd.

I have a small list of locations I want to see.

But tell me other places to stop by and other people to chat with and things to do.

Cheers!

If so what games do you play? And how do you find people to play with?

I see Herzlians say this about Jews all the time, and it really doesn't impress me. Aside from being an argumentum ad populum, it is a worthless assertion because the overwhelming probability is that very few of these Jews know better. None of these people have any idea just how brutal the settlers were to the Palestinians in the late 1940s, nor are they likely to be aware of Theodor Herzl's and Ben-Gurion's nauseating remarks about other Jews, nor are they likely to have a deep understanding of Haavara, to name only a few facts from which Herzlians shy away. The upper classes don't want to teach anyone about any of that, so they give the Jewish public a Disneyfied oversimplification of Zionism instead.

The reasons that many Jews approve of Herzlianism are similar to why most diasporic Italians approved of Benito Mussolini. Many Italians were casually profascist because the Fascists made them look tough and offered them obvious examples to cite proving that Italians weren't weaklings or failures. They were desperate for role models, so they could hardly afford to be picky. In any case, probably only a minority of them were deeply interested or committed to Fascist politics anyway, so it would be an overreaction to 'hate' all of them. Most of them simply didn't know better.

In sum, I don't care all that much if most Jews believe that it's 'wrong' to oppose Herzlianism, since I find it extremely unlikely that they support the movement being fully aware of all its horrible history. Sooner or later they're all going to outgrow it, just like many Italians outgrew Mussolini. Every day the apartheid regime moves closer to collapse.

For context, my brother gave me Warhammer 40000: Space Marine 2 for my birthday, and it has to be installed on an SSD. When I installed it on my D: drive, which, is an HDD, the game froze a few seconds into the opening cutscene, but the sound kept playing. After looking up this problem online, I found out that the hardware requirements section on the game's store page says "SSD required".

I got lemon8 and it's pretty decent, But It's probably gonna go bad soon.

You know sometimes you're thinking of something, not even saying it out loud, and then an ad for it pops up on your screen? There's a claim that scientists have developed mind-reading nano particles that have been put in food and water, humans consume them and then they read our thoughts and of course, this being a capitalistic society, use our thoughts to try and sell us stuff.

What do you think?

I watched this movie a very long time ago so my memory could be hazy. I also might be reading too much into it.

Asgard is destined to be completely destroyed in a catastrophe called Ragnarok. This is something from Norse mythology which I don't know anything about but is a popular theme in popular media. The whole film is about Thor trying to deal with Rigmaroll.

His solution in the end is to evacuate Asgards inhabitants and remove them from the land, let Ragnarok happen which also destroys the Bad Guy. So Asgard is destroyed but Asgardians live on. His rationalisation is that Asgard is not made by its land, geography etc. but its people, the Asgardians, and they can possibly make another Asgard later on unburdened by predetermined destruction.

Now I gotta be honest, overall I thought the movie was alright. The Bad Guy was terrible and uninteresting. But I liked the comedy in it. And this interpetation of Ragnarok is pretty clever IMO. The problem I have is that this complete disentanglement of the people and their land is incorrect. I guess in a fictional treat slop based on magical mythology it would never come up. But IRL the people and the land make each other. There is a recent Prolekult documentary which focuses on how an integral part of capital accumulation is the dispossesion of land from people which I am not intelligent enough to rehash.

I think this could be ignored but then you realise that this movie is by and (mostly) for cultures that are built on colonialism and settlerism, processes that are centuries old and still ongoing. Downplaying the ills of robbing people of their land and sovreignty is done on a regular basis. Palestinians are currently being robbed of their lives and their land at the moment. How do Marvel treat enjoyers understand the implications of removing all Palestinians from Palestine and relocating them to a neighbouring country?

As I said I am probably reading too much into it.

Like, where does this come from? Even people that aren't particularly conservative seem to think that less people = good. Maybe the problem isn't the amount of people but how their needs are met? Yes, the world is finite, but pretending that hunger, homelessness, wars and diseases are in anyway caused by the amount of people on Earth rather than how we deal with those things is as insane as denying climate change.