ADHD/INFJ/Virgo. so i created a tumblr because that's what all the cool kids are doing these days. this site seems perfect for my ADHD brain. i'm just over 30. male. east coast. sometimes i reblog softcore nsfw stuff (sorry. i'm trying to cut back), but mostly this is all about comics and tv. Steam / Amazon wishlist
While the giant bill was fake, it represented a very real accomplishment. The group raised more than $17,000, which purchased more than $1.6 million in medical debt owed by Philadelphians, according to their nonprofit partner RIP Medical Debt.
This is a great way to undermine the system that we are trapped in
The fact that this can be done at all shows how utterly bullshit the entire system is. There was literally no reason for that medical debt to exist in the first place.
Let’s say you owe a private hospital ten thousand dollars, but you have very few assets, so they’re pretty sure they’re never getting any of that back. There’s ninety nine other people who also each owe the hospital ten thousand dollars. (It doesn’t have to be a hospital; any debt can be sold this way.) The hospital has shit to do and the low chances of you paying them mean it’s an unnecessary drain on their time and resources to hound you all for it. But they can get *some* money, by selling your debt to a third party.
Let’s say the sell each ten thousand dollar debt for ten dollars (I’m making all these numbers up for simplicity). So a third party gives the hospital one thousand dollars, and now all hundred of you owe that third party ten thousand instead! You’re in the clear with the hospital, you owe it to these guys now! And their job is to hound and harrass you for the money you owe. If one of you pays up more than a thousand dollars, you’ve covered their initial investment. These guys are gambling on the likelihood that enough of you can pay your debts that you make it worth the time they spend tracking you and harrassing you.
Or, instead of trying to get the money out of you, they can just… decide you don’t owe them. Why not? They own the debt. They can fork out a thousand bucks, buy a million in debt, and forgive it. That’s what these guys did. (This is also a favourite move of John Oliver; if you ever see headlines about John Oliver forgiving debt, this is what he’s doing). A small payment can take a massive weight off the shoulders of a lot of struggling people.
Again, I made up the numbers to simplify the math. But this is how the process works.
Basically, Google invented a pretty good search engine 25 years ago, and because of that, it gets to rule the world in perpetuity.
I hate how it doesn’t even matter that it’s such a dogshit search engine now, I hate the terrible ways it reshaped the internet, I hate it here
You used to have to legitimate your rule by divvying up spoils with your warband; then, you used to have legitimate your rule through some moral or theological or political argument about divine right or the mandate of heaven or the will of the people; under late capitalism, the corporations no longer feel that they need to legitimate their rule at all. Even the lie of meritocracy hangs in tatters. It’s unsustainable, and everything that’s unsustainable will eventually end.
We say Google’s shit now, and it is, but it’s deeply depressing that it’s still the most useful search engine out there, I have my default set to duckduckgo, and I constantly have to flip back over to Google anyway to find anything. And don’t even get me started on Bing. Every time I accidentally use Bing I feel like I just barked my shin against a chair in the dark.
And to think there’s an ultimate reality out there somewhere that allowed to Ask Jeeves to rule the world
you don’t get it. i miss batman. except not that batman, and not that guy’s batman, and not that guy’s batman, but this highly specific iteration of batman that coalesces after you’re hundreds of batman comics deep and you figure out that everyone in your entire life has lied to you about batman this entire time. i miss that specific batman
i miss this batman from detective comics #457
i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #79
i miss batman from legends of the dark knight #67
i miss this highly specific sequence of panels from batman: black and white that is genuinely one of the best pages about the character anyone ever fucking wrote and i’m so fucking pissed no one ever doubled back to this shit
I MISS THIS STUPID CUTE SHIT FROM DETECTIVE COMICS #474
I MISS GOTHAM KNIGHTS #45
they did the, “what would happen if bruce wayne’s parents never died?” story decades ago. they’ve done it again, and again, and again since then, but no one has ever done it half as fucking good as they did it in detective comics #500, and the hilarious thing is, it’s not even the full issue, it’s one story in an anniversary issue, and it is fundamentally the best batman story ever told. the singular best one. the whole gist is that phantom stranger appears to batman and is like hey, i found a universe where your parents didn’t die, would you like the chance to save them? and batman of course says fuck yeah, carts in robin, and they go a-huntin, but the strange thing about this universe… is that it lacks, entirely, the concept of a hero. there’s no greek heroes. there are no superheroes. you don’t have achilles, perseus, or superman. there are no stories about heroes; it’s a universe where “luke skywalker” a character concept is impossible to fathom.
and robin’s the one who discovers that, and he’s like, look, dude… you’re this universe’s last shot at a hero. if you stop your parents from dying, you’ll never be batman, and there will never be a hero here, and in the narrow worldview of cape comics this is a Big Fuckin Deal, because then who is going to save all of those innocents? and naturally batman is like dude, fuck you, i’m gonna do it anyway. and then he goes and he saves his fuckin parents. but then you get:
he just becomes batman fucking anyway. because the whole fantasy of batman is that it is never wrong to save someone’s life - even at the deep personal cost, this is fundamentally worth doing. batman’s not bruce’s Darker Side or this twisted alter ego that is a monument to his trauma and pain - it is the precise and exact opposite. it is the weaponization of something that terrified and scarred you (bats, violence, the night) and using it to help people, therefore this is the greatest batman story every fucking told, bar none.
and yet frank miller slaps his dick repeatedly on a typewriter and i’m supposed to think that’s somehow better. but once you fucking know this is out there, people could just be writing about this goofy-yet-elegant character concept instead of trying repeatedly to beat the shit out of it and make it into something it isn’t, once you fuckin know, you fuckin know forever. you have to spend the rest of your goddamn motherfucking life seeing batman stories that reach a mere fraction of, what, 10 pages published in the fucking 70s? you’ve had since the fucking 70s to do this shit better and you made it worse? what the fuck? you don’t get it. i miss this highly specific version of batman, i don’t miss that guy’s batman, or that other guy’s batman, or that other guy’s batman, i miss this very one right here. i miss this fuckin guy
Assassin’s Creed Origins was really fun, but Football in the Groin had a Football in the Groin. And Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely satisfying, when you let it be what it wants to be.
At the beginning of summer, as I was nearing the end of The Witcher: The Wild Hunt, I asked the Internet for a game recommendation that would tick some very specific boxes for me, including open world, entertaining combat, some crafting, all that stuff I loved about The Witcher.
My friend Will texted me and said “The answer to your question is Assassin’s Creed: Origins. I know you’re going to…
I fell madly in love with assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
When the assassin’s Creed franchise first started I tried the first few games and didn’t care for them. The franchise kept growing but it just remained off of my radar.
Until Odyssey came out. I don’t know what it was that got my attention. Must have been various posts and fan edits us all here on Tumblr. But I gave it a shot and I couldn’t get enough of it. A lot of ways I felt like I was playing a Xena warrior princess game. So much fun. I loved interacting with those characters. My Kassandra felt like she was flirting with everyone.
At some point early on I even refused to use fast travel throughout my play through because I wanted it to last as long as possible. I wanted to explore every inch of that world.
After I finished I got some advice online that told me to try origins next. And I liked it. A lot. But not nearly as much as I like Odyssey. And then I tried Valhalla after that, and I was incredibly bored within minutes.
I can’t put my finger on exactly what the magic was for Odyssey but to this day it remains one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences.
I’m really looking forward to getting to Buldar’s Gate 3. Doesn’t look like it’s the kind of gameplay that I’m normally into. But I love everything I’ve seen about it, I love the way the people talk about it. The only thing stopping me is I’m afraid my old hardware can’t run it. Hopefully one day soon I can save up for some upgrades
