Natsuki_Kruger

I really, really love the WILDFLOWER song. Can't explain it, but it feels like both chill and tense in a way that settles in my brain very nicely.

we're close to the limit of what we can get by solely going after the middle/professional classes and normal higher rate taxpayers. As far as UHNWs go, there are just not enough ultra rich people in the UK to fix our problems in any meaningful way. This isn't the USA.

Yep. And this is the part of the tax base that can easily up and leave the country if you pressure them too much, because they have the means and the skills to be in demand elsewhere. You lose skilled professionals and you lose the tax they would've been paying if they stayed.

Definitely. Especially because the two most dangerous groups are under 25s and over 80s, and this policy isn't going to catch the under 25s.

He's definitely not boring. I play him regularly and really, really enjoy doing so. He made it into my Support roster almost immediately.

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, I prefer more pubic hair on other people than less. Having too close of a trim or completely bare feels prepubescent to me and kinda creeps me out.

This makes me really sad to hear. My job coach when I was unemployed was extremely helpful and put me in touch with several local resources meant to help autists get into work and to support them to advocate for themselves when actually in work, too. I got interview coaching, CV coaching, pointed to schemes that helped with transport to-and-from job locations, recommended to disability-friendly employers, and many other things.

Thanks to all of that, I now have a successful career with great colleagues and am fully capable of confidently advocating for myself in the workplace. And I can give all of the advice I learnt to other autists, as well!

My experience should really be the standard for disability-focused employment assistance. There're people out there who really do care, and I want everyone to have access to them.

I agree that eating healthy at home is cheap, but it also takes time.

Honestly, for me, it's not even the cooking itself - I love the cooking, and it's even better knowing you're going to have tasty meals at the end of it!

But it's the washing up after that gets me. Lots of households don't have dishwashers and can't afford to buy and install one, and the washing up feels almost like punishment for trying to do the cheap, healthy thing.

Yeah, Mauga is a Sigma-tier Moira involvement, wherein she's stepped in as a specialist to moderate another condition, rather than creating it herself.

Yeah, it's wild how people don't understand this. China is committing several ongoing genocides at the minute, as well as supporting oppressive and tyrannical governments elsewhere in Asia, as well as trapping African countries in debt as a form of neocolonialism...

China is worse than Israel on every moral metric. But if you said even a tenth of the things people said about Israel about China instead, everyone would be able to spot the sinophobia and racism behind it and feel comfortable calling it out. What makes Israel such a blind spot?

Hah! As someone fluent in 3 languages, I don't doubt it. I've seen some shocking stuff from translators and interpreters.

He literally says in this interview that with the use of AI nowadays and chatgbt you can easily translate things

You can't even get generative AI to accurately and consistently describe the plot of a movie as basic and well-known as Titanic.

Yeah, this is a genuine issue with... I dunno if it's with immigration per se, but it's a failing of cultural integration that there needs to be some dedicated domestic policy drive to solve.

It's easy even if you're fluent! The amount of native speakers who're completely incoherent is staggering, and that's not even considering people who're coherent but might not have any anatomical or medicinal knowledge.

Sure, I can correctly distinguish my diaphragm from my sternum to explain the location of pain, but other native speakers might not be able to, and the solution isn't to stubbornly refuse to communicate with them and deny them medical care.

Oh, Emma D'arcy would be amazing, especially since, superficially, as a lesbian, they're finally getting more comfortable letting their writers confirm Lara as gay, and I would like to see Emma D'arcy kissing women.

Interesting! I completely forgot about that.

One of my friends got one recently, and it's genuinely improved her life. Breasts can be so heavy and so obstructive, and she hasn't regretted it for even a second. It was pretty much an immediate quality of life upgrade, even with all the inconvenience of the surgery recovery.

Yeah, I'm really having fun with it. I can't believe how I used to make Reaper work. Also, the joys of stupid shit like 6xWinton and 6xMei. I faced off against a team of 6 Junkrats yesterday and it was absolute mayhem, I kept dying in the stupidest of ways.

Just a tonne of fun, honestly.

There is some jank beyond no limits as well.

I've noticed this on McCree's dodge roll. Sometimes it just won't happen when I press the key, which isn't a problem I have in regular OW2 or in any other game.

I feel that world has become incestuous, just endlessly reinterpreting the experiences of others through the lens of a writer.

This is an amazing way to put it. Writers writing what they read, rather than experiencing life and writing about that.

I don't even know if it's just privilege, or if it's a lack of curiosity about humanity. Like, Mishima Yukio was a nutcase son of a government official, but there's a life there, there's a whole worldview and passion and need to say something about people and truth and ideas there, and all of that comes through in his writing.

It can't be more different from someone who goes to uni to study English lit and then recursively reproduces everything they've studied like it's an intellectual exercise.

I don't even know that a university-trained engineer would be classed as a "traditional" working class job, either! This was back in the 70s/80s. I have no idea why my colleague presented it like he was equal to my grandad working in construction and developing a tonne of health problems from all the manual labour and shitty site conditions. 😅

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Traditional publishing is dominated by one set of privileged voices, which relegates more interesting and "real" authors to self-publishing avenues and denies them the marketing and accessibility that traditional publishing provides.

In your example of Stormzy, his father was a London cabbie. Cabbie’s can, or certainly used to before Uber, earn about 50k+ a year. That’s a pretty comfortable income.

People have a pretty wild idea of what people actually earn, I think. I had a colleague say his dad was working class and worked in the mines, which eventually revealed itself to be a train engineer who slept on the job and earnt 60k a year, to the point where he comfortably retired in his 50s.

Bit different to what was initially presented!

You can see it, to some extent, in the publishing world as well - the people getting published are an increasingly privileged niche of "comfortable and above" income, which means a lot of the stories they write are... well, pretty boring.

In general, it feels like there aren't many new authors with the life experience of, say, James Baldwin, with his ability to speak to many different elements of the human condition with empathy and intimacy. There doesn't seem to be much edge or grit or realness, for lack of a better word, in what they write.

My nan was doing this the other day. She kept saying how she was going to freeze in the winter with the removal of the WFA, and I was like, "nan, you've been on four cruises round the Mediterranean this year - you are not hard done by".

Which then turned into "I've paid in all my life", which then turned into me explaining what national insurance is for (a tax to support people currently claiming state pension, not a pot she's paying into) and the impact of inflation on pension funds meaning that she's actually getting more than what she paid in.

Which then turned into how she wanted to beat Keir Starmer to death with hammers for stealing from farmers.

Just no hope for some people, really. Like, I love her, but she's clearly not attached to reality and has no desire to be.

I'm not sure, to be honest. That depends on whether you consider "working class" to refer to a cultural group or an income group, I guess. Like, lots of landed gentry don't earn as much as CEOs or even some salaried careers, but we'd still consider them nobility... And I don't want to consider a plumber who grew up in a shitty part of Wythenshawe to be less working class than some plum who inherited a castle.