As A Fan Of Alternate Histories Of Various Stripes, There’s Nothing More Disappointing That A Story

You’re not an awful person, Madiha. You’re passionate about what you believe in and you stick to your principles, but you’re always willing to be open-minded, which is so hard to do in this day and age. That doesn’t sound like a bad person to me. I am probably the last person who should be an amateur counselor, but remember: those negative thoughts you have are not. true. They are years of insecurity and fear twisted by depression into a cudgel that give you a false view of reality and convince you that you deserve to be unhappy. Nothing they say is true.

We do not think that way about you.

You deserve to be happy. You will be happy. Whenever those thoughts start to roll in, remember that they are do not reflect reality and they are lying to you. Hold on to that. (This is really weird for me to write, but it tears me up to see you burdened with so much and know there’s almost nothing I can do about it.)

im really afraid im just a like, completely awful person but just utterly deluded in my own goodness that i dont see why everyone hates me

I don’t watch Westworld, but I always like hearing people re-orchestrate songs into different genres, and this is a damn fine example from a show full of them.

Troy Baker drinks Red Bull, so you know he’s evil.

Well....at least we can still drink piss water Monster Energy after the apocalypse...

I’m a touch surprised you didn’t know about the Red Army in BF1. When DICE released the “In the Name of the Tsar” DLC, they added “Tsaritsyn” and “Volga River” as maps explicitly set during the Russian Civil War. Kinda wish we could have done some fighting along the Trans-Siberian railroad line, but I suppose it would be harder to justify the inclusion of armored vehicles en masse.

i didnt know battlefield 1 had the red army in it so i was pleasantly surprised when i quickmatched into tsaritsyn on the red army side. i took a horse from the camp and ran around a tank and threw grenades at it until it exploded, then got caught in level geometry and watched a dude leisurely deploy a mortar and turn me and my horse into gravy. on my next spawn i threw gas grenades into a house and choked out 4 dudes, and got into a shooting match across a hill with my extremely comically bad fedorov-degtyarev against a sniper. good game.

“Assassinations are often harder on the consul than the senator...”

ANCIENT ROMAN MEME DISCOVERED

1 2

2 50

it doesnt translate very well

Speaking as someone who does a fair bit of reviewing and occasionally writes for an ezine filled with people steeped in academia, I often feel the same way. I'm always worrying that I'm not being "insightful" enough or that I don't know the correct language to properly discuss a particular theme. I find it helps to remind myself that, at the end of the day, I don't really want to be an academic or write in that environment (or have to force myself to learn that unfathomable prose), and that it's far better to work on something I enjoy doing rather than making myself miserable slaving away on something just to sate my insecurities or gain the approval of some imaginary person I don’t care about.

i feel dumb because i write fiction instead of theory or critical work

We live in a world where the film adaptation of The Hobbit is nine hours long and the film adaptation of The Dark Tower barely clears ninety minutes. Something has gone terribly wrong.

today Meatball abruptly realized that there are refugee office plants in the kitchen (they have been there for weeks) and has decided his singular purpose in life is to eat them 

I’m barely social on this social website, but I saw @coppermarigolds do this and I figured why not.

Rules: Tag 9 people you want to know better or just because you feel like it.

Relationship status: Single. Deeply, deeply, deeply single.

Favorite color: I generally like cooler colors, so depending on my mood I switch between forest green and navy blue, but I won’t turn my nose up at a nice burgundy or black.

Lipstick or chapstick: Neither. Lipstick ain’t my scene, and I have skin issues that make chapstick worth the hassle.

Last song I listened to: Gonna make it a twofer with “Gibraltar Bridge” and “Derailed,” two unreleased songs from the Wolfenstein: The New Order soundtrack that were put on Youtube by a fan.

Last movie I watched: Our Man in Havana, a delightful farce from 1960 that stars Alec Guinness as a hapless vacuum cleaner salesman in prerevolutionary Havana that is mistakenly recruited as a spy and starts sending in reports full of made-up stuff just to earn a paycheck. Imagine a version of Burn After Reading that still has faith in mankind.

Top 3 TV Shows: I’m not much of a TV guy anymore, but if I had to name three...Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 1 of True Detective, and The Legend of Korra.

Top 3 Characters: Kuvira, Richard III, Jean-Luc Picard.

Top 3 Bands: Because I am essentially a moody teenage girl, I’m going to go with mind.in.a.box, VNV Nation, and whatever Trent Reznor’s up to.

Books I’m reading: I’m between books at the moment, but I’m going to be picking up L. E. Modesitt’s Of Tangible Ghosts this weekend. It’s the first book of an alternate history trilogy set in a world where North America was primarily colonized by the Dutch and ghosts are real.

Those two facts may not be connected. 

I will forgo the tagging because I’m not sure that I actually know nine people in real life. :p

There’s a line in George Orwell’s 1946 essay “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse” where, in the course of discussing how Wodehouse’s work hewed closer to a fantasy Edwardian England than a fantasy interwar Britain, he wrote “...and Bertie Wooster, if he did exist, was killed in 1915.” That line has always haunted me in a way, and I believe that both for his good and our own, Bertie should always be kept far away from the horrors of the Great War.