Seeing so many people in the U.S. driven to either commit or condone violence both social and physical by their total disconnection from reality, as well as the heightened suppression and censorship of any and all dissenting voices, has me feeling like I'm growing an increasing disdain for humanity as a whole. So, I think it would be good for me to talk to someone who exists outside of the English-speaking world.

Obviously Japan is not the most detached country from the hegemony, and generally it has its own reactionary ideals as a state, but the reasons that I'm interested in speaking with someone from Japan are specifically that I've been gradually learning the basics of Japanese (I have hiragana and katakana memorized and I'm working on expanding vocabulary and figuring out sentence structure now, as well as slowly learning some Kanji), and that the average Japanese person is not consuming English-speaking media. I'm aware that Japan is beset by its own hyper-capitalist media hellscape, but it's still different, and that's what I need right now.

If you guys wanted to just reach out and talk casually to someone who lives in Japan, how would you go about it?

yeah it's Dragon Seeds again, deal with it

Multiple times in the last year, I have tried to join up with groups in order to enjoy social hobbies. And each time, a group of people who I can only describe as bottom-of-the-barrel, 4chan-tier fascist losers has been a part of those groups.

Being sensitive to the dogwhistles they use, I get uncomfortable and in one case even pointed it out to the friendly but "politically-detached" people running the group, but just got met with "you're 100% right and I see that the problem is real, but they haven't crossed any hard lines so I'm gonna have to give them the benefit of the doubt" - a phrase I have come to despise. I explained that by giving them that courtesy, you are alienating people who you actually want to be around, for the sake of keeping hateful scum in your midst. They nod, they agree, but don't do anything.

The result? The friendly people who didn't like the scum wound up departing, as I predicted. And now I'm leaving as well, because the entire group is dissolving, and because it's not possible to enjoy social hobbies with sick-minded fascists, whose ideology of hatred has been spread so effectively that each of my recent attempts to socialize are upended by their presence.

Of course I'm grateful for a place like Hexbear, where those people are quickly purged, but I realized as of this most recent instance that I will no longer be able to join up with a group of even just a few dozen strangers without a cluster of fascists poisoning it from within.

I should also clarify, a couple of these hobbies were ones I could easily engage in years ago without this kind of problem occurring.

Feels very bleak.

This fucking scum-of-the-earth racist was nothing more than a puppet owned and operated by the most vile, evil people to normalize bigotry and hatred to the degree of inciting outright violence, both social and physical. He's not a fucking hero, he's not even a fucking champion of "free speech", he's the most obvious example of a scummy, ratfuck weasel you can point at. The only people he cared about were the bloated parasites cutting his checks. Stop fucking treating him like he's a champion of the people AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

The fucking staggering disconnect from reality to look at a guy who literally just sits around saying as bluntly as he can "The people who have the least power and are the most vulnerable deserve to be publicly murdered and your fucking kids should watch it happen" while wearing the smuggest fucking expression possible and be like Oh no it's so sad he died he was such a hero!1!

HE WAS A CARTOONISH EXAGGERATION OF A GUY I WOULD INVENT IF YOU ASKED ME TO JUST MAKE UP THE MOST OBNOXIOUS MORONIC ASSHOLE I COULD POSSIBLY COME UP WITH. SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Also is any of the DLC worth it?

Dude in this discord server I'm in has Pepe the Frog in a Crusader outfit as his avatar. Unfortunately, it is a circumstance in which I'm compelled to deal with it rather than just ignore them, so I need sources to share with the server owner in order to convince them that a Crusader Pepe profile pic is a massive red flag.

Anyone got any resources I can link to?

mods delete if you have to I guess, not trying to instigate horny posting but I understand it's an inevitable consequence of this post

I have a friend who I've known for a while, and generally he's a really friendly guy, like the type of guy who will go very far - sometimes too far and at his own expense - to help someone else out. While the environment that facilitated our friendship ended a while ago and I didn't really keep in touch, I have the opportunity now to re-initiate that friendship.

Yet, I am having reservations because I'm fairly certain he has the "disorder" mentioned in the title. While the urge to be specific is quite strong because I want to be clear about the reasons for my suspicions, I don't want to go into too many details for several obvious reasons, so I'll just sum it up by saying he will almost constantly inject mentions of any number of very serious physical health problems he claims to have into any given conversation, often out of no where and frequently at times which are contextually inappropriate and unnecessary. He is generally self-deprecating, and overtly seeks pity from others, to the point of abruptly derailing conversations and social events for the sake of it.

I know a lot of folks here have a lot more experience with these kinds of illnesses than I do, and so I'm generally wondering if there's any insight y'all can provide for this sort of thing. Are there ways to tactfully convince him to seek assistance with his mental health, when he's so preoccupied with his supposed physical ailments?

Ceramic? Stainless steel? What should I get? I'm getting a lot of mixed answers and "AI" bullshit from trying to research it myself.

Thinking about grabbing it during the summer sale.

Burn it all down, libs. It's the only way.