This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.
Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.
It needs to be stressed that biases, not a lack of intelligence, is very much the issue here. Being aware of the need to fact check yourself is key: Intelligence won’t protect you from bad or unhealthy mental states, or keep you safe from cults of any sort. Intelligence will just make it easier for you to rationalize and attempt to justify the malformed tools you’ve taken/been given to yourself and others. You need to be wise enough to challenge yourself.
As a cult survivor, this is lethally accurate.
No joke, this is one of my biggest fears. That one day I might be manipulated so thoroughly that I will lose the very ability to question things.
I was also raised in a cult, and the thought of ever being manipulated like that again is genuinely terrifying. More terrifying than death.
This is it, I found it, the funniest post on this entire godsforsaken website
I will never get over how brilliant this comic is. The artist could have just drawn a single image in response, but instead we have this masterpiece. The world doesn’t deserve @iguanamouth.
I remember the first time I saw it, i stared at it for several minutes until I finally just started crying. It made me resolve to leave, and I turned in my resignation about a month later.
This is your reminder that if life keeps throwing you lemons you are not morally obligated to make lemonade from them. You can duck, or catch them in a trash can, or get a baseball bat and slam those fuckers into the stratosphere.
To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit
This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.
orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!
here’s my hot take about my generation and people younger than me (I’m 22 years old)
The reason current teenagers and people in their really early 20s are conservative on accident and have such shitty takes on the internet is because our generation was much more sheltered than previous generations and because we were raised to be ok with orwellian servailence and that is 100% the fault of our parents, Reagan Era kidnapping panics, and the rise of technology all coming together to prevent us from doing the sketchy shit that sends parents into panic mode but which is also completely fundemental to childhood development. If your parents had even a crumb of money to their name and even a shred of free time they started tracking your phone as soon as it was possible to. I did not experience this because my parents are actively trying to live like it’s the 1990s and still have not gotten cell phones of their own, and did not let me have one until I was 18 years old and it was no longer their choice, but literally over half of my friends in middle and high school had their phones tracked by their parents at some point or other, and we would occasionally find this out, not because their parents told them, but when we were trying to do the aforementioned sketchy shit and their parent’s car would pull up. And I would, like a reasonable person after finding this out, encourage my friends to just leave their phones at home, and their response would be “What if I get kidnapped” or “My parents are just trying to keep me safe”
This in my estimation has lead to a combination of kids being terminally online because they do have internet access and are better at deleting search history than their parents think they are, but don’t have the freedom to go out and do shit without their parents’ knowledge or consent, so they have the most privacy from the people who control their lives while they’re on the internet, and kids not having the real world experiences they should have, not knowing how to connect with other people irl, not feeling comfortable leaving the house because of the horror story lies their parents told them to make them ok with the surveillance they were inflicting on their kids. Kids these days are growing up in the fucking panopticon when they should be out in the woods playing with knives or stealing cigarettes from their older sibling and going out to an empty parking lot to smoke them or whatever and that shit is sticking with them into adulthood. Things that were “tee hee we could get in trouble isn’t this so fun and daring” in the 1990s and 2000s have become in the 2010s and 2020s things that are “If I do that without texting my parents some sort of lie to excuse where my location is my parent’s car will pull up and I will get grounded for the next two weeks.”
Like even when I was 19 I had a 16 year old friend who would volunteer their time at a food shelf and that’s how we knew each other. We would talk about dungeons and dragons together, and the game store was 4 blocks from the food shelf. One day we left the food shelf earlier than they had told their parents they would and they got punished for that. We were literally just going to look at dungeons and dragons miniatures and dice, which was self evident if you could see where we started and how far we walked and where too. I have to assume that this isn’t uncommon. It’s wrong, but it’s not uncommon.
Ok it has become apparent to me that people do not understand what I mean by conservative on accident.
Nobody my age is voting republican. Let’s be clear on that. With the exception of a small minority of gamer gaters and people who were raised in actual cults most people my age are either commies or good liberals who votes straight blue down the ticket. This is because of the greta thunberg effect. We’re all afraid of dying of thirst because there’s no water anymore at the age of 35. Wealthy white children are no longer safe with the republican party which has become less of a political party and more of a death cult, and white children are less wealthy than they used to be (I specify white because POC by in large never voted for the party of the southern strategy for obvious reasons). We as a generation are so insanely blue that they’re trying to raise the voting age to 25 about it.
This liberalism and party affiliation doesn’t preclude them from being conservative on accident. What I mean by that is… Well
No kink at pride is a great example. The assumption that pride should exist at all makes them think that they’re immune to conservative logic but they’re still trying to enforce a dominant ideology onto a minority group. That person who made the tweet about how you shouldn’t have sex in houses where there are children in the other room and if you can’t avoid it you’re a sex addict. That’s a great example of like straight up puritanism coming out of the mouth of someone who proports themselves to be a leftist
If you ever see a discourse that feels like an obvious psyop as an adult and you can’t understand why these supposed leftist youths are falling for it it’s because that kid has never had sex in the woods and had to try to buy plan b under their parent’s nose. My generation is dumb about sex. We’re dumb about drugs. We’re dumb about theft. We moralize literally everything. We’re so dumb about stranger danger that we never learned how to community organize so while the vast vast majority of us are crushed by existential dread about debt and climate change but we never do anything about it because we just don’t know how to organize because we’re raised to see everyone else as a threat and we never went to or organized parties as teens because our parents would always know and stop us.
They managed to invent a generation that hates capitalism but fully buys into individualism and who is supportive of queer people and way less monogamous than previous generations but who still buys into the base assumptions of the nuclear family and thinks sex is evil. The levels of politics going on here are way weirder and stupider and more complicated than “young people vote republican and watch Fox news”
Text: The sea in the north of our world was so cold, falling stars froze on impact, and were harvested by sailors with nothing to lose.
After you die, you start your new job in the polar colonies. The workhouse that has a claim on your corpse collects its property, ships you out on a freighter headed north. In the colonies they slit you open, dry you out, fill your veins with liquid salt. A necromancer walks between the rows of corpses, recites the ritual, raises up a fresh crop of sailors. You all shamble aboard the star trawler, animated by the contractions of frigid corpseflesh that only dimly remembers living. You’ve nothing left to lose - not life, not liberty, not even a claim over your own body.
Time to get to work.
Up north, you freeze. The world is very, very cold. The air here is dry as salt; every drop of moisture has been frozen.
If you were still breathing, your breath would freeze down through to your lungs, so it’s a good thing that you aren’t. During the six months of day, sun glares off the sea of ice to become blinding. So you
work through the half a year of night, great vats of seafire burning, their searing heat only
barely holding back the wall of cold. Your flesh freezes, thaws a little, freezes through twice over, ice crystals rupturing through the cracked furrows of your skin, your face rimed by what little fluid still lasted in your cells. The first few hours after arrival, you’re all shedding white flurries of flakes like dandruff every time you move. After that, the cold and salt preserves what’s left, preparing you for your endless work.
You are here to dredge up stars. Sometimes you see them streak across the sky as the ship obediently glides across the ice to intercept them. Elsewhere, stars touch down in the oceans and are extinguished instantly in great clouds of steam; or else they hit land and burn too bright to even hope approaching, dying down to leave only ash and a smoldering black ingot of celestial steel.
Here, even fire freezes if exposed to the cold too long, twisted tongues of it stretching up from torches left burning across shifts, crystalline and bright as flame. Stars hit the sea and freeze on impact, becoming glittering clusters of gems to be dredged up and shipped around the world and put to work in forges, or in shards for profligate nobles to let thaw and flicker and die out, behind their smiling lips making a wish.
Mostly, the work is waiting. Stars fall sparsely, and with little warning, and the sea is very, very vast. You sail beneath a calm night sky that stretches on forever, through the unimaginable cold, the stars distant and impassive. You don’t mind the tedium. You’re dead. Your life is over. None of this means anything. You could man this ship forever, frozen, waiting for the stars to fall away one by one until there’s nothing left but the darkness of the grave. It’d be familiar.
And then, one day, you catch a star.
Down below, the astrolabe that pilots the ship starts whirling wildly, magnetized in the direction of star metal, veering the ship off-course. Up above, the sky glows blue. It’s like an inverted sunrise, the star so bright it seems to bleed into negative, a frequency of light your undead eyes can only comprehend by its absence. It would be beautiful, if you still cared, or were capable of caring. The star streaks down, igniting the dry air as it passes, cutting a fiery trail behind it, growing brighter, brighter, too bright to even look at, until it crashes down into the sea.
The sea ice shatters, upheaves, from ice to water to a roaring cloud of steam in half a second, and almost as instantly back to ice again, a scintillating galaxy of droplets suspended in the air, glowing with the star’s reflected light. The sea surges around the star, swallows it, is cast up by it, is liquid and solid and gas and flame all flowing in phases seamlessly into one another. Flames crystalize, burning brighter than they ever have before, and the frozen sea becomes fluid beneath the trawler, tossing it on a surge of vapor, flinging you about like matchsticks. Dead sailors grab at the rigging, their faces lit by an unearthly light that for a moment makes them look almost angelic. And then you are thrown overboard, down into the sea that freezes over you, down into its black and icy depths until motion slows and comes to a stop, leaving you all alone down there in the cold and fathomless dark.
It’s fine. You’re dead. You had nothing left to lose anyway. The last thing you see is the distant light of the frozen star, before the darkness swallows you up and becomes complete.
There is no light. There is no air. There is no heat. You’re not sure how long it takes for you to realize that you’re awake.
Your hands are working, in the darkness. Your lips. Your eyes. It’s simply that there is nothing to see, not a hint of light to see by. You feel the ground beneath you, and only afterwards realize you are feeling. Long-dead portions of your brain have come alive again, slowly puzzling out sensation. In the airless, lightless void, old memories come welling up of your life before the colonies. They hurt. They overwhelm you, these distant thoughts of light and warmth and people you once loved. You were dead. It was over. You were supposed to have nothing left to lose.
And then you feel the touch of filaments crawling gently across your face, and you realize that you are not alone.
The filaments slip into your ears, into your eyes, down your throat. They tap at the little membranes in there, pluck at the nerves directly. You hear the vibration of voices thrumming to you in the airless void. They apologize to you profusely, say that they found you frozen at the bottom of the seabed, and probed their graceful filaments into your brain and bit by bit pieced it back to working order, and woke you.
They are, again, very apologetic about this.
They are doing something to your eyes. The darkness lightens slightly, becomes fuzzier, less absolute, giving you the impression that maybe there is something to be seen. How long has it been, you try to ask them. Your throat and tongue convulse, without air to push through your lungs, and the filaments listen. When is it now?
It is the end of the world, they tell you.
You take this in.
The stars are all gone, as are the sun, the moon, they tell you. All fallen from the sky a long, long time ago and shipped around the world and burnt down to nothing. The seas have evaporated, the air grown too thin to breathe. There is no light left, and very little heat. Though they can tweak the nerves leading to your brain, they hasten to add, to make you believe you are in a bright, warm place with plenty of air, safe from harm. You can tell that they are trying very earnestly to appease you. It won’t be that bad, the end of the world, they tell you hopefully. You might actually find it rather pleasant…?
You are exhausted. You have lived too long, seen too much, had a stake in far too little of it. You’re done. You don’t care, about light, or warmth, or safety. It is the end of the world, and you don’t understand why you are still here to witness it. Why did they bring you back to life, you ask them. Why now? What was the point?
They hesitate. They were hoping you might tell them what it was like, they tell you, tremulously. To look up at the sky and see all the countless stars?
You sit in silence. The darkness has taken on the quality of the darkness behind your eyes, as if you’re sitting quietly with your eyes closed, thinking. The memory of the star crashing into the sea comes rising up, unbidden: the clouds of steam flash-frozen into ice, the crystal fire, the star descending from the heavens to paint the night sky blue, that moment of unearthly beauty at the frozen ends of the earth, witnessed only by the listless dead with nothing left to lose - and then you trace your fingers over the trembling filaments running across your face, and in a halting voice you tell them about the stars.
