It’s implicit. I’ve been a lurker for some time; check any of the social megathreads and you’ll certainly see people constantly going on about gatherings, restaurants, organizing this and that in person. These people are not masking. The ones that are will be talking about it, because it is impossible to be masking in the current year and also be social without noticing the dissonance. Any pushback to this point will be met with apathy at best, hostility at worst. It seems to be treated like veganism, where there is an unspoken policy that everyone acknowledges it is the correct stance to take…but if someone is not following it through for whatever reason, they just aren’t going to mention it at all, and doing so is breaking decorum. In this case “don’t ask don’t tell” doesn’t work when you still mingle about going to bars or concerts or whatever else like nothing is going on. This itself is a form of (normalized) violence, which is where “this site is pro-eugenics” comes from, a sentiment I am in agreement with because the base of modern society is pro-eugenics.

While this is despair inducing, we can’t give in and sink to the lowest depths. There is a need for moderation throughout the site when it comes to the eugenics (subtle or over) and covid denialism, and it needs to come from US, not the mods!

What do you do when the “help” is unwanted? At best, we can do agitation, and I have been barking up this tree IRL and online since the early years. People won’t change. They don’t want to change. If they do, they are an outlier, and I have not met a single one of them. The only time any of them did anything was when it was policy and under threat of consequences—visible consequences that they can’t wave away like degrading health. We won’t get there again without it. Even then, not everyone would abide. People were on their deathbeds decrying the existence of COVID. All I, a human being of “the community”, have succeeded in doing is burning myself out while no one listens and the party outside goes on unimpeded. What then? As someone else here put it, someone needs to be COVID Stalin to shape the discourse. It will not happen for our part. We have no authority, a fact that is easily confirmed by trying to talk to anyone about COVID whatsoever.

People are always talking about upworth. What if I want down?

Thank you for engaging with my festive content.

It is (my attempt) at a moon! & moon-related merchandise.

I don’t either. Everyone has their ways, I suppose. The way of hundreds of browser tabs is full of Sin and gluttony, is all.

Is it not? I thought there were other proprietary bits & telemetry removed, like what LibreWolf does. Maybe I’m lost in the semantics of “fork” and “custom version”…

Thank you for engaging with my shrubbery content.

Thank you for engaging with my real world content.

Thank you for engaging with my Content on the internet.

Thank you for engaging with my Content. Nudity is not pornographic!

Thank you for engaging with my killer content.

Thank you for clipping my engaging art content.

Thank you for freeing the bush. I mean engaging with bush…I’m new to this, sorry.

Thank you for assessing my Content.

Thank you for engaging with my Content, 先生. Yours was a direct inspiration!

I use Fennec, a fork of Firefox for Android inspired by Librewolf on desktop. Iceraven is a similar thing. The differences seem very minor to me. Fennec is on F-Droid, Iceraven you need to use Obtainium to download. Both of them support uBlock Origin.

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You’re totally fine. I think that is the correct reading, for the record. Which is why I say that I am glad it was made before COVID, when that reading would have resonated with me, and I can re-contextualize it for the time period it was written. It would not (does not) resonate today. Today, if I were to meet Steban and Ulixes, the representatives of that hope for and resilience of the future present in a war-torn world facing encroaching oblivion, they would tell me that asking their demonstrations to require masking is too alienating to the proletariat, and they won’t be doing that, actually. Precious lines about stars going out in the darkness notwithstanding.

In the real world, COVID was the trial run for how, during a genuine Earth-shattering crisis, a global movement in the modern age materializes, and nowhere in the world was able to meet that very important bar*—how can I believe that we will Do Climate Action, another practically Olympian feat and one just as if not more threatening, let alone Do Communism, a relative pipe dream, in this light? I can’t. I can’t ignore what’s happening in front of me every day, and what’s happening is the era of blackest reaction, gleefully. Remember how a strain of the flu went extinct in the US when only half the population (a generous estimate, even in the early years) were wearing unfit cloth masks—not even proper respirators! Remember when the viral memes all over social media were about nature healing and returning to us when we stopped it all for just a few months? Everyone said no, to that, after a while. Overwhelmingly, and around the globe. Look at what we accomplished when we were merely half-assing it, and we refuse!

The future is unknown, and nothing is forever. I’ll do what I always do: what I can. Fighting is in my blood. I couldn’t stop if I wanted to. In spite of that, I do not have hope, and no one will be able to convince me to hope in this world, with the people that made and continue to make this. We aren’t totally helpless lemmings at the whims of our overlords, not completely, not everywhere; we’re all complicit in this as far as I’m concerned. We’ve by and large abandoned each other, and especially the most vulnerable among us. It’s not just leadership. China’s Zero COVID was supremely unpopular, and what eventually led to its retraction. Try asking your next PSL chapter meeting to mask up. They won’t. This is what’s necessary, and even those without the genocidal, fascistic tendencies of the worst of us won’t abide. How could I not loathe this outcome and everyone who perpetuate it?

*That said, credit must be given to the few countries that stuck it out for years despite global pressures. China and I believe Taiwan, too? New Zealand. There were others, as well, but those are the ones that come to mind right away.

It is one of my favorite video games. I think it is a masterpiece. I’m glad it was made before COVID.

I was sobbing even before then, during the conversation with the Deserter, which I would later learn is not a common reaction to his dialogue, apparently. For all his other flaws, he was me. I am still him. There may be two wolves inside of me, in fact. They’re both gay. I hope this makes sense.