bandai namco: this is yuri lowell. he’s jaded and rough. left the knights, willing to dirty his hands with sin. A Hard Man. An Anti-Hero.
me: this is yuri lowell. he starts off the game daydreaming when some 5 year old barges through his front door to scream about the plumbling. he doesn’t even flinch, may not have actually registered what was happening. picks up 6 children plus this drunk man who said hi to him once in jail while trying to find some plumbing equipment. he’s 21. hasn’t taken a bath in a while(the plumbing is broke). CAN’T drive. CAN’T keep his gaggle(or himself) under control. CAN’T stop eating the rich. CAN cook. CAN throw hands if you’re mean to his kids. CAN pet dogs. CAN eliminate evil pricks with his sword. INTENDS TO fight the old gods in a walmart parking lot. trying his best
Y’all really interpreted “no one is entitled to your presence or your time” to mean “treat the people around you like video game NPCs and explain nothing.”
Y’all keep doing this thing where you push good advice to a place where it becomes mean and devoid of empathy; there is really a difference between self-care and total self-interest.
Pretend, for a moment, that you’re an 18-year-old teenager from a family living below the poverty line.
One day, you make a silly mistake and get a ticket for it. Nothing major - maybe you rode the subway without a ticket or smoked too close to the entrance of a building. Maybe you were loitering. Either way, one thing is for sure: you definitely don’t have the money to pay the ticket.
So you don’t.
Eventually, you miss the deadline to pay your ticket, and you get a letter in the mail that says you have to go to court. But your life is chaotic, and a court date for a missed ticket is the least of your concerns. Your family moves constantly, which disrupts your life and puts you behind in school. You have one disabled parent and one parent who is always working, leaving you to raise your younger siblings by yourself. You have no means of transportation. There is rarely any food in the cupboards. The utilities are constantly getting shut off. The week that you were supposed to go to court, your family gets another eviction notice, your cousin ends up in the hospital, and your parent finds out that their disability payments are being reduced.
So you miss your court date.
Since you missed the court date, you automatically lose your case - now you have no hope of arguing your way out of the ticket, which you still can’t afford to pay. You can do community service hours instead of paying, but you don’t have time to do that, now that you have to work part-time and odd jobs on top of everything else to keep your parents off the streets and your siblings out of foster care. You know that you probably won’t finish high school on time, let alone fulfill your hours. You might be able to explain your circumstances to the judge, but you have no idea how to go about doing that now that you’ve missed your court date, your literacy skills are years behind thanks to your constant game of school roulette, and even though legal help is available to you, you don’t know how to access it or if you can afford to do so. But that’s still the least of your concerns - since you missed your court date, the judge has also charged you with failure to appear.
Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.
And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources.
So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all.
When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into.
So when we’re talking about crime, punishment and who is “worthy” of being helped, maybe keep that in mind.
wlw: i feel uncomfortable approaching girls romantically because i have been conditioned to believe that my attraction to them is predatory and i’m afraid of making them uncomfortable
very smart and cool people: wow you are such a loser and the same thing as an incel
i feel like counter-trolling is an essential skill that kids online aren’t learning and it’s kinda worrying
like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated.
and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh
so, what’s the solution?
dare ‘em to post dick pics.
don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose.
this is the tactic used by the fans of a podcast (that i haven’t listened to) called the Chapo Trap House, and 4chan’s /pol/ users fucking HATE them. they hate Chapo Trap House and think they’re crazy because Chapo Trap House fans refuse to engage in meaningful debate and repeatedly demand dick pics. they get frustrated and leave. it works.
Some of you never used your position as a mod on an a series of unfortunate events forum to get a racist troll to post evidence of their tax fraud and it shows
…that second comment is oddly specific and I’m a little scared
You know when a fast angry song comes on that you know every word to and you’re in just the right mood that your eyes light up with the fire and angst of a thousand punk rockers and you just feel so alive
