This makes me so sad and also I'm trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism

After years of patient effort, Genesis finally conditions Angeal to stop buying the rock-bottom cheapest version of a thing that he can find and instead shop for quality and durability, on the reasoning that he will spend less money in the long run.

One day Angeal is going to wake up in an apartment chock full of expensive shit, and Genesis knows he's going to catch absolute hell for it. But until then...

The boots theory.

It's expensive to be popr.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

Terry Pratchett, "Men at Arms"

Why Being Poor Is So Expensive | SOME MORE NEWS

It's so much easier to make money if you already have money.

My bank sent around a message about a gaurenteed return bond thing. You can put money in for 8 or 15 months. You get a gaurenteed 5% return.

(Except it's not actually 5%, it's either 4.88% for the 8 month and 4.16 for the 15 month, and the number of days in the months matter somehow? IDK. Whatever.)

Anyway, all you need is a minimum of $500. "I can do that!" I think. "I got my tax returns, i have money I've been squirreling away in savings, I could switch some of that low-interest savings money to this for a while!"

And then I think about the math, and I look at the handy supplied chart of returns.

The lowest figure on the chart they give as an example is *$10,000*. At that sum, in 8 months you will earn... $330.

Yes, it's "free money" but it's still somehow so underwhelming. 10k is such a huge chunk of change to me, and while an extra $330 in any given month would be be huge difference, over 8 months?

So, like, if I was to take the entirety of my savings I've painstakingly put away over the course of *eight years*, and tied it up in this account for eight whole months - meaning it would not be available for me to draw from if I had a sudden emergency, which is THE POINT of savings for me - I'd get a whole whopping $165??

That seemingly "reasonable minimum" of $500 would earn you $16.50

Now, if I could put away 100k, which the chart so helpfully shows, I could earn $3,300. That's getting to the point where it seems worth it. But to earn that, I have to have 100k just sitting around that I *won't need for at least eight months*.

Of course they don't put the $500 minimum or even $1000 on the chart. Who'd be excited to see a return of $16.50 or $33 listed?

But if I have huge stacks of cash laying around already, that cash could make me a reasonable amount *by just sitting there*

The trick is you have to not NEED the huge stack of money in the first place.

I know it's more "Water is wet" science, but these kinds of reports are what end up on the desks of MPs when they're drawing up state and federal legislation and budgets.

Richard Siken, Boot Theory // Frank Bidart, The War of Vaslav Nijinsky // astralcorbozo on TikTok // Mary Herbert, A Long Time in the Desert // Dan Deacon, When I Was Done Dying

soft and scarred and blushing yellow

In reflection, perhaps it makes sense that Puss fought Shrek in such an "I'm gonna annoy you" way. He wasn't very serious about it.

He's an outlaw, but he's certainly not a cold-blooded murderer, and he has a moral code (no stealing from churches or orphanages, for example). And besides, he probably knows enough about the stigma against magical creatures to know Harold was just being specist.

So he goes "I'll take the money, but the ogre is probably just a poor SOB that annoyed the king. I'm gonna rough him up, scare him off and then I get to keep the money and he keeps his life. Everyone wins."

And then when he gets caught, he waits for the table to turn to go back to martyrizing Shrek, but he realizes the ogre is just treated like shit by his father-in-law, and decides "you know what, I'm not enough of an asshole to break his marriage just for some gold. I'm giving him a hand."

And then it turns out it's not just the father-in-law, but there's an active conspiracy by the fairy godmother to control the government of Far Far Away and keep the social hierarchies of fairy tales in place. And she got the whole order of chivalry (cops) in her pocket, as well.

What's a noble outlaw gotta do in this situation, if not help bring down the racist the shadow government that enforce a specist system?

Death (as a living being)

I’m actually surprised no one has talked about this before but I’d just like to share my thoughts about this because I thought this was a little interesting

So at this part and during the cave scene with Puss, Death emphasizes on the fact that he’s fond of the scent that is fear.

He mocks Puss almost the entire film, making these elaborate ‘illusions’ in Puss’s head. If he simply wanted Puss dead, he could have just killed him, but as he admitted it himself, he decided to ‘play with his food.’

He gets annoyed when Puss mentions the phrase, “I laugh in the face of death” and quotes him in the cave, saying Puss had never even noticed him because he laughs in the face of death. Puss laughs in his face, quite literally.

And obviously, he was annoyed by this. So what better way to get back at him than to quote him to his death? Death clearly wanted Puss to know the exact reasons he was cutting his life short and he made sure Puss knew it well; he struck him with his blade, immediately deeming the statement ‘never been touched by a blade’ as false and continued to haunt him when he tried to get more lives back in hopes of shaking Death off of him.

Death exerts an extra amount of effort into playing the role of ‘the big bad wolf’, raising his sickles and using them as hand gestures instead of his actual hands.

But no one has questioned his sudden shift in personality when he finds that Puss does in fact value his life and now sees Death as an equal rather than a concept that is below him.

Death looks VERY different from how he did the entire movie. But what else was different in this scene was his intentions. The moment his intentions changed, his creepy/scary complexion had completely faded away into something more gentle. Even his voice had grown soft towards the end of his sentence when he says, “Right?”

What am I getting at? Well, basically, judging from his last scene, I strongly believe that a lot of what we were able to infer about Death’s ‘personality’ from the entire movie was barely even half of how he truly is. The things he says like “I just love the smell of fear”, “go ahead, run, makes it more fun for me,” and “this is gonna be fun”, had mostly been the side of him that he showed to mortals who didn’t know their place in life. In fact, I believe in the cave of lost souls he almost oversells the idea of Death being Puss’s worst fear as he constantly repeats Puss’s quote and tells him, “but you’re not laughing now,” like that wasn’t something Puss already knew.

And regarding his rage when he yells, “why the hell did I play with my food” in spanish, it kinda just confirms that Death was playing a role and this may or may not be how he views fear or mortals in general.

The last scene was a sliver of what or how Death truly was; a softspoken creature who just wishes to be respected by mortals.

But that is just my interpretation of the movie. I very well may be completely wrong about this, but I just thought I’d share my views on this film and how Death was written.

—  Richard Siken, Boot Theory

[text ID: A man takes his sadness and /  throws it away / but then he’s still left with his / hands.]

Kaladin, explaining his past to Adolin: So, after working tirelessly with Bridge Four to save ourselves from the near-hopeless situation we had ended up in, I was no longer a slave. I no longer had to walk barefoot and in rags everywhere. Adolin: *horrifed* Storms, Kaladin; you've had a incredibly difficult life. I can see exactly why you disliked me when we first met; people like me had literally beaten you down for your entire life. I'm... I'm so sorry. Kaladin: Thanks, Adolin; that means a lot to me. Adolin: So... what happened after you had finally been released from slavery? Kaladin: Your wife used her privilege as a light-eyes to rob me of the boots I was wearing. Adolin: ... Kaladin: ... Kaladin: Yeah, now that I think about it, that explains why I didn't like her for so long-

With this I pay my fee to enter the Simps club of Jack Horner 🕴

Now that Matpat is retiring I can happily say that I hated him. He held transphobic views, consistantly misgendered cannonically trans characters, donated to anti-autistic charities, and villanized/stygmatized mental illnesses.

You were all too busy sucking his dick to realize it, but he doubled down on the things he said, never apologized for half of the abhorent things he said, and his fans consistantly harrassed people who disagreed with his theories or called him out.

Anyway, MATPAT RETIRING! SO LONG BOZO!

MOST OF THIS SHIT ISNT EVEN OUT OF CONTEXT IN THESE VIDEOS; like op says in the description, probably because people were harrassing them. AND IN CONTEXT ITS STILL BAD.

BUT ITS OK, RIGHT? ITS OK IF UTS JUST A THEORY! RIGHT GUYS!?!?! ITS JUST A GAME THEORY!!!!