This could be mechanical things like the order of adjectives, or more complex/personal things on your journey of learning another language.

I want to start learning Norwegian again and I remembered learning a lot about citrus fruits as I went on Wikipedia adjacent trips.

I would pick Magneto from the X-Men comics. I think if he was written by better writers and comics weren't the vessel of a lot of fascistic ideals, he wouldn't come off as 'villain who goes too far'.

His backstory is so much more interesting than what powers he has. He survived the Holocaust as a child and when his powers developed, he sought out other people like him to prevent future atrocities. He formed the Brotherhood of ~~Evil ~~ Mutants and opposed humanity's attempt to kill or control mutants. He's long-lived because his experience as a Holocaust survivor is integral to his character. With that age, he's been well-read, studying science, history, literature, and art. He's educated and due to the way comics keep the timeline contemporary, he's bound to have strongly formed opinions on whatever is happening.

Having incredible power on top of that makes for such interesting questions.

"Why don't you just more often?"

"How much more efficient are trains when you can move them with your mind?"

"What are your thoughts on the concept of dehumanization?"

I dunno. Sometimes I see interesting characters and get frustrated that they're not talking about their lives or experiences. They're restrained by capitalism and you don't get to see cool interpretations of characters who you're supposed to believe are real people.

I'd love to helm a rewrite of Magneto to make him aggressively anticapitalist and antiracist I know. But it's like this character has studied the world on how to prevent fascism and genocide and he's still not calling out the contradictions of capitalism. He's not pointing out how oppression is used as a tool for profit. I want to see the guy who read Marx and then got superpowers.

I thought it would be funny if I cropped out the author's name on the article, but I decided grace, citing my sources to avoid the irony singularity

I just mean things you do or can do for yourself as part of self-care?

Here are some of mine:

Relaxation Break - 10 Minutes: Like if you're sitting at a desk, or have some time where you can steal five minutes away from whatever's bothering you.

Little Chore - 5 Minutes: Some small productive thing you can do in that time and no longer. Like if you want to do some dishes or you want to replace the toilet paper roll.

Listen to Music uninterrupted - ? Minutes: Pick a song or an album and just let it rip without getting up to do anything. This one is really hard for me where even doing a 2 minute song was hard.

Watch something - 2 Hours: Movie, video essay, anime, whatever. Challenge - Impossible: Do it without doomscrolling.

Like no shit, I'm going to make my one safe place look nice.

Fellow Hexbearians,

I was thinking about how embarrassing it is to ask questions about things that seem obvious, so why not make a thread here? We can pool our understanding and clear up any misconceptions we picked up living in a world not built for neurodiverse people.

Ask questions about things you don't understand that might seem obvious. If there are things you do understand in someone else's question, please do so and help clear it up.

I ask that we ask and answer questions sincerely. This is a discussion about confusion and trying to understand. I think it would feel safer if we don't think we're being mocked or trolled.

I'll put a comment in the thread to get things rolling.

I think I'd like to see what people would do in their leisure time or domestic work . You see so many stories about travel and war, but you rarely see people interact outside of that. And if you do, it's usually not made unique for a setting that isn't Earth.

What cutlery do they use? What does a morning routine look like? In a world where fire magic is commonplace, how do they cook? How would those things evolve over centuries?

Fantasy especially feels stagnant for this, but I think sci-fi is guilty of this too. Are there things in specific works where an innocuous detail made you wonder more about how a setting worked?

If you believe in timelines or different worlds where 2023 is completely different, that seems to me like an inspiring idea. That means in a timeline next to ours, they took their first step into making the world we would like to have.

Who's to say we aren't doing that here now? Who's to say we can't be the timeline where we get communism in our lifetimes? If multiple universes are possible, then in one of those universes, the timeline diverged right now and a chain of events will unfold leading to the reversal of climate change. Bad things are happening right now, but there's still so much possibility out there. Looking back as a pessimist, I didn't expect same sex marriage getting legalized, the positive conversations around sex and consent in general, massive contradictions of capitalism getting noticed by the population as a whole, or the destigmatization of leftism in the US.

It's bad out here, but the me from 2016 expected worse. I'm not saying slow down or disengage from the world if you have the bandwidth to do so. I'm not saying we should wait for the universe we want to bring itself into existence. I'm saying that we can still do things to make the world we want to see. I don't think it's too late and anyone who says otherwise benefits from our apathy. Join an org, talk about politics to people who will listen, answer questions even if it's obvious to you. If nothing else, take care of yourself and survive knowing that every day you spend enjoying your life deeply and personally hurts chuds everywhere. If we keep persevering through this, we might get to see our efforts pay off. We could be in a good timeline.

Anyway, I wrote this as a thanks to the community I met here who validated my experiences and made me read theory. I just finished Parenti's Black Shirts and Reds and bell hooks' The Will to Change. I'll share them with my IRL friends.

I'm joking with the meme, but it's an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people's lives in fiction.

It's telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn't acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that's normalized in things like Samurai Jack.

Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they'll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who's acting like how we understand humans.

I feel like there's something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.

Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.

I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.

What about you though? Any tropes in media you'd like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?

I'm not seeking out a diagnosis or anything like that. But I don't know how I come off. I don't know if I'm trying to be too funny or dramatic. I don't know if I'm being condescending or rude.

I don't know if I'm making good points or if I'm inconsistent with my reasoning.

Sometimes I just want someone to tell me what I'm like because I can't tell and I don't want to be shitty to people. Is that just anxiety? Or is this me being neurodiverse too?

I'm convinced all the time that I'm being shitty to people or a bully.

People familiar with me here, could you tell me a little bit what I'm like or what vibe I'm giving off? Is my writing disjointed or difficult to read?

What do you do when you feel this way?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Thanksgiving_Turkey_Presentation

This originates from an annual tradition from the 1940s where the turkey presented by representatives was later killed and eaten. It wasn't until the 70s when they started sparing the turkeys. During Bush Sr's presidency, it became a formal ceremony with a pardon and everything.

It's this big ceremony on TV where named turkeys are brought to the White House to get ceremonial pardons. Some have food-related names like Marshmallow or Drumstick.

Charlie in 1987 trying to finish what John Hinkley Jr. started. He spent the rest of his days at a petting zoo.

The first president on record issuing a "pardon" to his turkey was Ronald Reagan. Reagan had been sending the turkeys presented to him to farms and zoos since at least 1982, and 1987's turkey, Charlie, was likewise headed to a petting zoo. At the time, Reagan was facing questions over the Iran-Contra affair, on whether or not he would consider pardoning Oliver North (who had yet to be tried for his involvement in the affair); Reagan conjured the notion of the turkey pardon as a joke to deflect those questions.

Reagan did not make any pardon references in the 1988 presentation, but his successor, George H. W. Bush, instituted the turkey pardon as a permanent part of the presentation beginning his first year in office, 1989. The phrase "presidential pardon" in that ceremony was apparently inserted by a speechwriter; Bush initially was indifferent to the terminology, saying "'Reprieve', 'keep him going', or 'pardon': it's all the same for the turkey, as long as he doesn't end up on the president's holiday table."

50-80 turkeys are selected based on their behavior from a pool of turkeys up for slaughter. The 10-20 best looking and most behaved turkeys are selected, then two are finally picked and get named by the president.

This year, Jennie-O brand is bringing two currently unnamed turkeys for Biden to pardon.

For those curious about the fates of the turkeys. It's not great. In a fashion that's particularly telling of the US:

For many years the turkeys were sent to Frying Pan Farm Park in Fairfax County, Virginia. From 2005 to 2009, the pardoned turkeys were sent to either the Disneyland Resort in California or the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where they served as the honorary grand marshals of Disney's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In 2010, 2011 and 2012, the turkeys were sent to live at Mount Vernon, the estate and home of George Washington; Mount Vernon stopped displaying and accepting the turkeys due to the fact that they violated the estate's policy of maintaining its own historical accuracy (Washington never farmed turkeys)

For many years, the pardoned turkeys were documented to have very short lives after their pardoning, frequently dying within a year of being pardoned; for comparison, heritage turkey breeds have lifespans on par with those of wild turkeys, at least five years.

Emphasis mine:

The lifespans of the pardoned turkeys have steadily improved in recent years, frequently having lifespans of over two years and occasionally reaching three years of age, an improvement attributed to better choices of homes after the pardons; rather than serving solely as tourist attractions, the turkeys are now placed in the care of experts who make conscious efforts to maintain the turkeys' health for as long as possible.

So yeah, in the spirit of aesthetics, the US president puts an animal on TV, promises it life and then leaves it to survive the machinations of an empire in violent decay. All the while the rest of them are condemned to die away from the general.

It just really makes a mockery of so many things the US pretends to care about.