They don’t care, mission accomplished. People have already starved, and mud sticks enough that they can starve some more.

He says, on the internet.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.

TL;DR: whisper ‘queue’

Whistling isn’t blowing air out a hole in your lips; it comes out there, but it’s not what you do.

Instead, you blow downwards across the hole, like blowing acrosss the neck of a coke bottle, albeit from the inside.

There’s two ways to explain this - different people do better with each.

The first way is with speech sounds

First, a raspy cat-hiss consonant somewhere between kkhhhkhkhkhkh and hhshshshshh with the back of your tongue, to aim a stream of air at your lower incisors.

Second, the tip of your tongue not all the way forwards as you would for yyyyyyy, nor all the way back as for awwwww, just neutral as for uuhhhhh. This sets the pitch: forwards for high notes (making the ‘bottle’ smaller), and back for low ones (making it bigger).

Third and least important, the lips. Don’t purse them tight for wwwww like you’re going to kiss your grandmother; go with a super-casual oooo, like you’re muttering ‘cool’ sarcastically under your breath.

Put them all together without using your vocal cords, and whisper hhkkhhkhkhkheeeeeeuuuuuooooo, or something like a raspy guttural version of ‘queue’.

You’ll want to mess with that consonant to get the airstream angle right; just keep practising and you should get a lick of tone in there. It’ll be breathy and you won’t be able to hit high notes - but we fix that in part two.

The second way starts off with shushing, like you’re soothing a newborn, or making steam-train noises.

Just shh-shh-shh up and down a scale.

No vocal cords, just shaping your mouth to filter the white noise into something lighter as you go up, heavier as you go down.

Do the shh-shh equivalent of do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do and back down again.

Keep doing that as you slowly bring your lips together.

As you do, you’ll find the filtering gets more effective, and your notes get notier.

Don’t purse your lips tight, just bring them together enough to blow crumbs off your phone screen (or something idk)

Practice a bit, and you will be able to make a breathy tone that’s more note than hiss. It won’t be great, but we fix that next.

Once you can reliably get a breathy tone straight off, then you can clean it up. Now you purse your lips tighter like you’re kissing your grandmother or saying wwwww, and the breathiness will go away, and you’ll be able to reach high notes without it falling apart.

It’s harder to find the tone in the first place this way, which is why you started out on easy mode - but once you can find it, it’s easy to fix up.

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of practice.

Remember that if you’re straining with any of it, you’re doing it wrong. Keep it super relaxed, and until you get to the cleaning-up part, quiet. There’s no strain, no pressure.

I’ve saved a few dozen kids from genital mutilation, that I know of.

That’s probably my proudest achievement to date.

I’ve also taught a good 50 people to whistle that never could before, and while that’s pretty low impact, it still makes me happy.

It was zero degrees today, and it’ll be twice as cold tomorrow.

The most fucking annoying thing about TF2 is how the two gamemodes are now shitposting and comp, and I blame the idiot who named it ‘casual’. There’s no space where you can just play the damn game with people making a good-faith attempt to win, except in comp, which is, well, comp.

What it needs is a three way split: silly, serious and competitive.

I don’t care that it’s outdated, everyone still needs to read https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

“Slaves, obey your masters” is not radically opposing the existing power structure. Nowhere will you find a single instruction to disobey the powerful, or hold them to account.

Like I say, people-pleasing behaviour is definitely in there; Matthew 5 is all about not having any boundaries. But you’ll notice it’s not aimed at powers or principalities, nowhere does it suggest that masters should not beat their slaves or that kings should not retaliate to acts of war - and they’re certainly not for god himself, who absolutely would not forgive anyone for their ancestors’ disobedience without a major blood sacrifice, thus that whole crucifixion thing you might be vaguely aware of (though admittedly it’s pretty niche, hidden deep in the lore somewhere). Those instructions are for the little people, to keep them in their lane.

Which is not, to be extremely clear, to suggest that I’m some kind of randroid fuck who considers altruism to be a weakness; very much the opposite. We could have a much better world if more people would be nicer to each other even when they didn’t have to be.

It’s just that one-way altruism imposed in the context of a rigidly-endorsed social hierarchy just ain’t it. If the poor have to do all the heavy nice-peopling while a bunch of rich untouchable assholes work them to death and torture them for lulz, that would fit more into your whole late-stage-capitalism kind of bullshit - and christianity does not one fucking thing to combat that, while actively propping it up round the edges.

Christianity is not about compassion and peace.

Forget utilitarian ethics altogether. Think of a twisted version of virtue ethics, where the only virtue is power.

Narcissism and sociopathy flows downwards from the top, submission and people-pleasing flows upwards from the bottom.

From the top down, having power makes you virtuous, and exercising power reflects that virtue.

If you are in a position of privilege and power, if you can kill people and take their stuff and get away with it, that marks you as powerful and to-be-feared, and therefore admirable.

If you are some kind of peasant, the opposite applies: you must be a submissive people-pleaser or face severe punishment.

If you’re somewhere inbetween, you do both: oppress those below you, and grovel to those above you. This is virtue on both fronts.

That’s conservative morality in a nutshell.

Christianity endorses this structure wholesale. It pats the peasants on the head and tells them they’ll be rewarded (one day, not today) for being good little people-pleasers, and puts a final boss at the very top of the org chart so that the powerful can do some token groveling-upwards, and so the peasants have someone else to grovel to when nobody’s around. It fits hand-in-glove with everything conservatives love.

Compassion-mercy-and-peace is just marketing spin clipped from the instructions for people-pleasing. Go along to get along, be helpful, don’t rock the boat.

You’ll notice that the core concept of christianity is earning tolerance from the powerful despite complete degradation. You are utterly worthless garbage and deserve to be tortured with fire forever; only via the sacrifice of an actual god can you can be promoted to salvage - though of course this status remains a completely undeserved gift that you should be overwhelmed with gratitude for.

Like a cop deciding not to murder you this time round: you are so blessed, now pick up that can.

Of course they love it.

Why does Israel need all that money for bombs and warplanes, when they could just go spit on Hamas and break their windows?

Because it’s not 1860

My siblings and I were raised by an abusive narcissist who spent most of her free time screaming at my dad, when she wasn’t emotionally abusing and neglecting us.

But of course the cultural narrative was that men are only and always abusers, and women are only and always abused - so we normalised it; our whole reality bent around the notion that she was the poor innocent beleagured victim just doing her best to survive.

We took a vast amount of damage because an interpretation where she was the abuser simply wasn’t available to us - instead of forming defenses against her, we rendered ourselves more vulnerable.

I don’t take kindly to being told to go fix women’s problems first before mine will matter.

Imagine being told that your pain matters less because not as many people who look like you suffer from it.

I really like ruby :(

Mostly English mustard on smoked salmon sandwiches. I’ll also throw some in cheese bechamel sauce, as it sharpens the cheese flavour right up.

I don’t like american mustard, which is basically just turmeric sauce.

The blame falls on the people pulling the trigger. Don’t fall prey to the fucking wifebeater’s excuse.

So the assault isn’t some necessary part of their plan to target Hamas, it’s just a fucking holocaust they’re using as a threat.

Good to know.

Smol tiddy Gith GF begs to differ :D

Cishet guy; I play female characters more often than not.

One factor for me is that so many male characters feel… cheesy, like the game assumes I’m hideously insecure in my masculinity and need to be excessively pandered to by making my avatar Muscledick McFireman, and all the ladeeeez will just be aching to jump into my pants when they see my ridiculously huge arms.

It feels like really sad wish-fulfilment fantasy, to the point that it wrecks the immersion; it’s almost getting into AI Girlfriend levels of cringe.

There’s more to it and I haven’t fully worked out all the edges, but that’s a big lump of it.

I mean yes okay I also ferinstance play female dwarves in dragon age because my god Becky, but that’s both minor and very situational.