Advice possibly appreciated, but I'm gonna talk to my uncle about a concern I have.

He wants me to visit him on July 4, and whenever a discussion like family gatherings comes up, my uncle can sound very forceful in the way he goes about it. He'll say stuff like "You ARE going! It's not optional!", even though I'm a grown-ass adult living by myself in a totally different state.

There are multiple reasons why I'm opposed to going:

1. My time and money: I have been working a lot more to make funds to get the hell out of my current living space. This is crucial because I literally have flat-out racist and evil roommates in my vicinity, and the discomfort they cause me is so much that it's a grand motivator to make me slave away. Getting on a plane to visit my uncle in a very distant state will cost me the flight and deprive me of time I could spend working. Such an endeavor is not more important than me prioritizing getting the hell out of here. I will have time to visit my uncle later. For now, it's just not appropriate.
2. COVID-19: A lot of people stopped giving a damn, but I'm not going to assume that getting on a plane will be safe for me with COVID-19 considered.
3. Awkward encounters: There will likely be other family members there that I haven't talked to in a long time. I'm non-binary, transfeminine, and I've been on estrogen for quite some time, alongside going by a completely different name now. Although I'm out to my uncle, chatting with other family members that I'm still closeted to could still potentially be uncomfortable at best and distressing at worst.
4. Being there for my partner: I can't devote time to my partner at all if I'm focused on ensuring a visit to my uncle. My partner and I are both great supports for each other in times of distress, but we're also just very in love (gay) and have a ton of happy moments too. Due to her recent streak of more depressive and anxious moments, I want to be as accessible to her in this current moment that I can, as she would want to be the same for me.

There is probably another reason I could dump out of my brain if I think for 5 more minutes, but I'm sure you get the point by now. Due to the very forceful nature of his language in discussing this gathering, I'd feel really bad telling him that I cannot see him for the day that celebrates this horrendous country's independence.

My uncle is in his late 50's, but despite this, he will sometimes guilt trip and say things like "I have to reunite with you all before I die," especially since he has not seen me and some other family, such as my brother and cousins, in a while. It's just very concerning, and because I'm aware that he has had struggles with depression himself, it makes me feel bad to give him the "No, I'm not going," but I simply am unable to go.

I violated my oath and I've failed you all

…because of the thing with the money. And then losing my wallet, and then one of my plushie friends. It’s only going to get worse. I really hope I die before it does.

And in a bit over a week from now it’ll be the 1 year anniversary of the last time I saw my friend, the one who won’t talk to me anymore. One down, the rest of my lifetime to go. I know I’ll never see them again and while I think I’m over the cringey weird shit, I still think about them pretty much every day and it hurts so fucking much.

You know I’ll never get a car or a minivan or whatever. Definitely not before this winter—it gets harder to cope with every fucking year.

Fuck.

Title mostly.

I'm doing fine right now, had an argument with my brother but overall I got my path forward ironed out, but I can't shake the feeling that all of what I do is just some pathological need to stumble forward into what I'm supposed to do but rather than actually being a meaningful calling or direction.

Maybe I'm just depressed.

A bunch of restaurants around me shut down recently and everyone blames the greedy servers for demanding more tips and wages. They're blaming shoplifting too, claiming petty crime simply isn't punished enough. Someone I know claims shoplifting is legal in California.

Americans can't conceive of real estate capitalists squeezing other, smaller capitalists. It's always gotta be taxes or baristas asking for higher wages.

Every restaurant that shuts down around here is 100% the fault of landlords. No restaurant has ever folded because the servers got paid $10 per hour instead of $8 per hour

100lbs of rice and 50lbs of beans just fucking destroyed. These blighted assholes are really making me rethink my "no-kill" trap policy.

The fuck is wrong with this man?

Can't post links here without doxxing myself, but the megachurch wannabe/president of one of the boards of education around here is finally being called out. I've known about unsavory things he's done in the past, but this is the first time one of his victims has come forward. And it was someone that I was relatively close to. I'm so glad to see him finally go down.

His name was Blueberry, he was a blue whale who looked like he was made by the same company as Creamsicle. I only had him a week at the most but I loved him. I’d show you a picture of him but seeing it would be painful.

Whereas Creamsicle is a silly lovable little dumbass, Blueberry’s schtick was that he was a mature adult whale who dispenses difficult to listen to life advice.

Creamsicle will be staying at my friend’s house longer than expected because I never want to lose him, and I know it would only be a matter of time before that would happen if he were hanging out with me. He’s happier there—he just doesn’t realize it, because he’s just a baby whale.

I hope I just left him in my friend’s car, and if not, I hope he’s found by someone who will love him…

Note: I do not actually believe that uhh…you know.

CS degree is kinda useless, right? I haven't slept the whole night applying and thinking about this...

He was dead when I found him. Also found quite a few giant wasps that were definitely not dead.

Maybe the solution is to stay off Twitter, but it's very disturbing to see the normalization of slurs happening in real time on there. White people saying the n-word with approval, the return of saying "gay" as a pejorative, lots of casual racism against Indian men, using the r-slur to describe something seen as stupid. I don't know whether this is a larger cultural lurch to the right, or whether it's mostly attributed to Musk's elimination of quality control and monitors on the platform.

This might be old news but it's kinda wild to me.

You might remember Doug Lain from being the publishing manager when Zero Books rose to prominence, back when Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher made a big splash way back when. He moved on to Sublation Media and seems to be doing roughly the same schtick after Zero got taken over by a different parent publisher. (History seems to rhyme for Doug, getting put into his position at Zero Books with the ouster of the old crew when John Hunt took over only for Watkins Media to take over John Hunt, ingloriously booting Lain out in the process.)

Doug has always been a part of the sorta eclectic post-New Left cultural critique, in that milquetoast style of BreadTube broad left "YouTube Killed The TV Star: Adorno, Benjamin, and the desolate media landscape of late capitalism" or "One-Dimensional Marvel: Marcuse and the MCU" style of slop. Y'know, the stuff where it's super pretentious and yet deeply tailist of pop culture trends with a smattering of a couple of the quotes from the key text referenced in the title, the same one that every textbook and every first-year student quotes, in order to give the impression that it's super serious marxist critique when it's actually just 20-60 minutes of anti-capitalist bellyaching combined with the latest fad.

Yeah, that sort of stuff. He's good buddies with Ben Burgis who is a hack that has been trying to position himself as the patron philosopher-saint of the progressive-to-socialish left for years now, to little avail.

Welp, turns out that Doug had Peter Coffin on for an interview a month ago here, where he's uncritically buying into the whole "woke ideology" narrative and all buddy-buddy with Coffin, who is Caleb Maupin's #1 fan (turns out that Peter Coffin isn't handling the divorce well). And apparently Doug has been doing some livestreams on Midwestern Marx and MAGA communism (I thought they abandoned that name, but Doug doesn't really have his finger on the pulse tbh) and he has an upcoming stream on Maupin and Coffin. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to stomach multiple hours of livestreams from Doug Lain about PatSocs and Midwestern Marx to get a read on what his position is.

In one respect this development is totally on-brand for Lain, to be chasing whatever audience and principles be damned (the Angela Nagle bullshit didn't faze him - doesn't matter; sold copies, he was quite comfortable hanging out with the stupidpol crowd on Reddit too) but in another respect, his frequent collaborator Ben Burgis has always played at sheepdog to the left by policing the limits to radical left discourse and positioning himself as anti-authoritarian and buying into that anti-communist paradigm so it's kind of a weird pivot.

I think Peter Coffin's angle is pretty apparent - he's just courting a legitimate publisher so that a ghostwriter can do some turd-polishing for whatever he manages to draft, sparing him the indignities of having to self-publish next time around.

But it's still weird to me. Maybe they're proving horseshoe theory true and making a connection between the libertarian faux left of people like Lance from The Serfs, Beau of The Fifth Column, and Ben Burgis with the authoritarian faux left like MWM, Maupin, and Coffin where Doug Lain is the connecting point between those two trends. I guess if they're all on different grifts, and they are, then this would explain how it all fits together neatly.

But on the other hand idk. It feels like the online discourse on the left is reaching a weird inflection point. You have Gabriel Rockhill and his Critical Theory Workshop, Rockhill being closely associated with PSL and someone who should know better, courting the MWM audience. Then you have Doug Lain, who should also know better although I'm not surprised if he doesn't give a damn, doing a similar thing and he's broadening out to openly PatSoc audience and not just confining himself to the crypto-PatSoc MWM audience. It's giving Strasserist vibes tbh.

Luckily it's online and not the real world, I guess?

It's gonna be a really awkward moment when Hinkle, Haz, Maupin, Coffin, and MWM drop the pretense and finally jump the shark to become openly fascist, perhaps taking some of these courtiers with them. Imagine having the tankies screaming for years on end about these clowns being fascist in all but name and orbiting Larouchite cutouts with nobody listening because "tankie redfash", only for this position to be vindicated eventually. Though if history is any guide, those SocDems are gonna find themselves chanting PatSoc slogans side-by-side with the likes of Hinkle, Haz, Eddie and Peter to own the tankies:

We live in interesting times.

This beef is related to XScreensaver being forced to make a privacy policy, but this list is pretty fucking based.

don't wanna get filtered because people think I'm some libertarian freak

but also 🤢liberal

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2781613

Do any of you have experience with community mesh networking? It seems like a fun time and a good way to connect with people (socially and technically lol) in the community. Not to mention the possibility of providing at least limited internet access to people who can't access it by conventional means for whatever reason. A community mesh network might also have organizing possibilities - especially because the state or the cops or a company can't just shut it off or look inside it as easily

I don't really know where else to post this, so I figured my comrades at Hexbear might appreciate it.

A couple months ago I was coming back home from the weekly Palestine solidarity rally. On my way back home I needed to somehow obtain a $5 bill to tip the grocery delivery guy that weekend, and thought "Hell, I haven't had a cigar in a while, maybe I'll pick one up". There's a cute little Cuban cigar shop down the road, so I popped in.

The owner is a short Cuban man, and he was rummaging through his cigars doing whatever cigar-store owners do in their down-time. I walk in the door. He looks at me, then looks at my keffiyeh, then back at me, then back at my keffiyeh, and then says "...Palestine?" Not knowing his politics, I reluctantly say "...yes 😬?"

This triggers a 40 minute long discussion, whereupon he goes off on how fucking despicable what's Israel is doing in Gaza is how they are getting away with mass murder in broad daylight, doing "exactly what the nazis did" etc etc. He had clearly been following what's been happening and was sickened by it and I got the impression he didn't have much of an outlet to express his thoughts (as many of us don't).

I wanted to buy two small cigars (the ones on the right in the photo) and he said that he'd give me a discount, and ended up giving me three free of charge, on the condition that the next time that I was out protesting the genocide in Gaza that I "yell a little louder for him" ✊, to which I of course agreed (there are only two in the photo because I've smoked one already) I honestly tried as hard as I could to give him my money but he simply would not accept any.

Although I left the cigar shop without the $5 bill I went in for, I did leave with three exquisite Cuban cigars free of charge.

So, I felt I needed to repay this guy for the ~$100 of free merchandise he gave me. I ordered him a keffiyeh made in the West Bank just like the one I was wearing. When it arrived, I popped back into the cigar shop and said " I have something for you." and put it on his desk.

I will never forget this for the rest of my life. How much did you pay for this?

I lied and said "Only about $60, don't worry about it."

You're lying. What cigars are your favourite?

I insisted that he not give me any more cigars because I was trying to pay him back, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. He ended up giving me four deluxe Cuban Bolivar cigars straight from Havana. On the way out he gave me a fist bump accompanied by a "Free Palestine".

So Hexbears, this is how I unintentionally stocked my cigar humidor with solidarity for Palestine 🇵🇸✊

I'm going to save a spare one so that maybe one day I can smoke it on the beaches of Gaza when Palestine is free.

Link to this beaut

I under-estimated comb size 21 on my Braun trimmer (still can't figure out if it's millimeters or freedom units), and used it to trim my head. I was also under the assumption that using size 13 on the sides would give a fade.

Well, turns out that there's really not a lot of difference between 21 and 13, at least to the visible eye - so there's no 'fade', and me being at at Norwood scale 3 makes it even more worse, almost like a Tonsure Mini Pro ™.

Now I look like Jason Statham if he was a pedophile monk. Kids will look at my franken-hair fuckery and piss off their pants.

That capitalism is anti-life

That private property is theft

That political power flows from the barrel of a gun

That Palestine will be free from the river to the sea

That gender rights are human rights

That love is love

That a liberal scratched bleeds fascism

And that the choice is between Socialism or Barbarism

She doesn't drink, so I'm kind of at sea with what to suggest for a first date. We end up meeting at this gelato shop downtown. We hang out for a bit and chat. I ask if she wants to walk over to this book store. We walk over. We walk to the philosophy section (i'm looking for Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, have not been able to find it anywhere). She picks a random book in the philosophy section. Turns out its a book that has no business being there, a Brothers Grimm book. She opens it.

In the back of the book is $700 in cash.

We look around thinking, surely, we're on camera and this is some kind of prank.

We took it. She buys the book for $6. Then we went to a concert together.

I still cannot fucking believe this just happened.

how tf do i call out of work. i never do this shit and i'm always terrified of doing it. i hate my job and would much rather do the thing with my friends tomorrow but i'm a terrible liar and have a deep seated need to be seen as doing good, even by my fucking b*ss. does anyone have any tips for how to do it?