I am going to vote against fascism. If the Democratic party insists on choosing a candidate who agrees with Republican efforts to genocide me, then I am going to vote against their fascist too. And don’t come looking for me to whine about it after; by the time the Niemoller poem gets to you I’ll be long gone already.

My in-person community was toxic and abusive, and I didn’t even realize it until I found a warm, accepting, and much healthier online community to compare with. “Retreating” was a survival need. I’m glad your offline community isn’t harmful to you but don’t assume that is the case for everyone.

I’m also part of one of those small artistic cultures you mentioned and it evolved and thrived way more with the arrival of the internet than it ever did in the days of small in-person gatherings and physical-only publishing. Art is furthered by cultural contact and mutual exchange of ideas, not isolation.

Now, you do have a point that there is a problem with homogeneity and stagnation these days, but the real cause of it is late-stage capitalism. The harder it is for the average person to make a living, the more they are forced to focus all of their energy on making money. For an artist, that means not having any time for masterpieces or experimental projects because Fast and Marketable is the only way to make rent. Arts and culture are starving because a small number of billionaires are sucking up all the financial nutrients (and then passing censorship laws to cut down anything that still manages to grow, until the only things left are as boring and mundane as they are.)

My Aberrant Mind Sorceress had been making frequent use of her telepathy ability to communicate silently and to keep in touch with allies that went scouting away from the party. Then she opened something she was told not to and ended up with a piece of Nyarlathotep living in her mind. When she later used her telepathy on the Monk, the DM ruled that it allowed the outer god to enter his head as well. Now we had a permanent three-way group chat that neither I nor the Monk could leave, whose moderator frequently posted literal nightmare fuel, and the rest of the party was suddenly very insistent that I only communicate with them verbally from now on.

One time I tried using my telepathy on an enemy. His head exploded. Gnarly was very unhappy about me adding people to the chat without permission and suggested that I not do it again.

American Evangelicalism is a tulpamancy cult. I was raised Evangelical, sent to a private Evangelical school, and made to attend several Evangelical churches until adulthood. In all of these communities, it was universally believed that God directly speaks to each person through a special voice in their head. I was very strongly pressured to find, listen to, and obey this voice, and made to feel like I was not a “true believer” for being unable to channel it into glossolalia.

Inertia. I hate that word. I’ve been hearing it my entire life from my father, who clearly noticed this trait of mine, but instead of helping me he turned it into a means of piling on guilt and shame. “You have too much inertia.” “You need to stop having so much inertia.” “Why aren’t you fighting the inertia? You said you wanted to do this.”

I hate that word.

This is beautiful! Now I want to learn how to make these but I know that’s just the ADHD looking for a new hobby to stop caring about in a week.

I’m not hunting them specifically, their cockpits just happen to be magnets for my Marauder’s laser and autocannon rounds. :P

The first one I saw, in an early “titan” mission, got taken out by a single alpha strike from long range and dropped three salvage. (I renamed it Queen Crab when I noticed that some parts of the mech were white after applying my blue/pink paint scheme.)

Meanwhile, my canonically enby commander is rocking a fabulous magenta mohawk and having fun headshotting all the King Crabs so they can sell them to afford catperson surgery.