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A lot has happened in Lebanon over these last couple years and I haven't given a breakdown on the situation across the country because I didn't know wtf was going on most of the time. Everything is finally settling down so I think I can approach this now. I'm going to skip the events of the war because I have talked about those already. I'll just compare the situation before and after the war.
Situation October 6
Lebanon is a total shitshow in every possible way. The economy has totally collapsed. The politicians are all the same ones from 1990, the gangsters who were lucky enough to not get car-bombed during the Civil War. The government doesn't function anymore. Even the lowliest civil service job is appointed through patronage from one of the gangs parties based on a complicated scheme where power is divided among a dozen religious sects. That system has broken down and nothing is getting down now. For example they can't remove a pile of 2,000 tons of decaying explosives before it explodes or provide power for more than a few hours per day. The presidency has been vacant for a year because the various factions refuse to compromise with each other.
Background note: The President of Lebanon is elected by the parliament, not a popular vote. He needs a 2/3 vote so there has to be consensus. He must be a Maronite Christian.
Every one of the parties I talk about below are from the civil war. I've written extensively about all of them. It's not really necessary to understand this but if you have any questions about them, I probably answered it there. If you haven't read them, short story: They're all buttholes.
Who is to blame for the impasse? There's a lot to throw around.
The Sunnis for whatever can't come up with any unifying leader beyond Saad Hariri, who is too busy licking caviar off a whore's nipple in Ibiza to inspire political change.
The Christians are divided. FPM, a vehicle that the last president used to support his megalomaniacal Napoleon-inspired ambitions. He's way too old now so he's turned it over to his son-in-law who is notorious for being even more corrupt, greedy, and r-slurred than your average Lebanese politician.
The Lebanese Forces during the war was basically the mafia controlling and "protecting" Christian areas. Now they've reinvented themselves as a political party, but they're still run by literal serial killer whose main job during the war was doing massacres and gang hits against Christian rivals. But now he's got a bunch of r-slurred zoomers supporting him, because hey, who care's about his body count if it was a long time ago?
Marada is a small Christian party that represents the interests of the Franjieh family, who have strong support in one region of the country and close ties to Syria. Notable because he's Hezbollah's favorite and his opponent in the election Geagea personally murdered his entire family.
The Druze still are completely loyal to Walid Joumblatt. He knows that his sect is a small minority so he throws his weight behind whoever is going to win. At least when he's not too busy smoking weed and shitposting on Twitter.
Amal is basically all the Shi'a who don't back Hezbollah. Maybe they're secular. Maybe they're normal Shi'a who just don't buy into Ayatollah Khomeini's Vilayat-e Faqih heresy. They don't have the luxury of idealism since most factions in the country and most regional countries are gunning for the Shi'a right now. Led by Nabih Berri, speaker of parliament and a genius for using political patronage to wheel and deal for what he wants. Lots of blood on his hands too from the war.
Hezbollah is important enough to get more than a bullet point. I don't know what to call this organization. It's an army, a militia, a political party, and a welfare system. They gained a lot of prestige for driving the Israeli occupiers out in 2000 after a long guerilla war. Everyone was like "cool, now that the war is over you can give up your weapons". But they found bullshit excuses to not demobilize and resentment has been building since then. Most of the corruption in the country isn't done directly by them, but they use their military power to block anyone from fixing the government, because if they did it would order them to disarm.
They're in trouble now. A lot of their popularity came from social programs that they did in impoverished mostly-Shi'a areas that the government didn't give a shit about. That was funded by Iran. With the sanctions and general decay of the regime, Iran is in serious trouble and has had to cut their donations way back. The population is really pissed off at the complete breakdown of the government and is smart enough to realize that Hezbollah is cockblocking any effort to reform it to solve their problems.
Even more serious, the Assad regime in Syria has dominated Lebanon for most of the last 60 years. Most of these factions have been allied with them at one time or another, but their power has greatly weakened after the Syrian Civil War left the regime as a crippled fragment of the country. Now it's Hezbollah who are most dependent on them. Iran delivers weapons to them through Syria, so they can't keep building up their rocket arsenal without it.
Israel and Hezbollah have both been remarkably good about keeping the cease-fire since 2006. Hezbollah is deterred by Israel's completely overwhelming military power and the damage they suffered in 2006. Israel is deterred by their humiliating defeat in the ground war in 2006 and Hezbollah's massive arsenal of 150,000 rockets, many of which are long-range precision-guided missiles in the same league as ATACMS.
Now
The situation has radically changed in the last few months, more than I've seen in my life time. To summarize the parts of the war important for us here: It turns out that Hezbollah's huge rocket arsenal was vastly exaggerated by the Israelis. The 150,000 rockets didn't exist. The Israelis have infiltrated their organization to an astonishing degree and kill most of their leadership. The Assad regime collapsed like a wet piece of cardboard.
The good news is that the "Shiite Duo" (Hezbollah and Amal) that has cockblocked any kind of reform in Lebanon is not able to do so any longer. They can't be completely ignored, but they can't stop the nation from making progress. Hezbollah is in complete disarray. Their leaders are dead and every means of communication they have is presumably compromised. Just as they can't coordinate their military forces, they probably can't even come up with any political policy. The collapse of Assad's regime means that they can't rearm and replace the weapons lost in this war.
The general public already was very turned off on them before the war started as they were the most powerful faction so they were most to blame for the country's dysfunction. They might have won some moderate degree in sympathy if they had won victories on the battlefield like in 2006 but their catastrophic military defeats have completely undermined their whole raison d'etre. The said that we have to tolerate a "resistance" group outside of the government's control because they were the only ones who could protect the country against Israeli aggression. That made a lot of sense in 1990s, not very much sense afterward, and it makes no sense now. The completely failed to do any damage with their vaunted rockets and on the ground the IDF was too smart to play their game and just didn't attack. So if you're a Christian, a Sunni, or probably most of the Shi'a who don't have a zealot personality type, all Hezbollah managed to accomplish was to drag the whole country into a war and then lose it. Remind me again, why do we let these people have their own private army?
After the cease-fire a president was finally elected after 2 years. The Shiite Duo stopped insisting on Franjieh, who would never have won because if he's president he might remember that Geagea killed his dog (and the rest of his entire family) and go John Wick on him. The winner is commander of the armed forces Joseph Aoun, no relation to commander of the armed forces Michel Aoun who was the last president. ("Aoun" is like "Smith" and they always go to the army for a compromise candidate.)
Joseph Aoun
He seems like a good choice. He joined the army in 1983. During the Civil War he fought for Michel Aoun against the Lebanese Forces of Samir Geagea in the 1990 "War of Elimination" when the army tried to wipe out the gangsters terrorizing Christians and assert the authority of the state. Notice that I mentioned both of these people above and this is the second presidential candidate who fought against Geagea. Are you guys starting to understand why this soap opera is so interesting?
Word is that he's always been very apolitical and gets along with everyone. He did military training in the USA and Syria. His election is approved by Saudi Arabia, the USA, Qatar, France, all the major factions in Lebanon. (Notice this is the one country in the world where their soveriegnty is such a joke that other countries openly declare which candidate they're voting for.) We can only pray that he ends up like Fuad Chehab, the one successful Lebanese president, who was put into power by the US with the same idea, that he was an apolitical compromise candidate who everyone in the country and the region could accept. He went on to create the good times of the 1960s, so who knows, anything could happen.
Hezbollah is playing hard to get, whining about his choice of prime minister, but this is a negotiation tactic. The other factions, even the Maronite patriarch, have said that nobody will be excluded. By this they mean that Hezbollah will get some representation in the cabinet.
Future
What does the future hold for the Lebanese? Hopefully a hot twink with a nice car who can get you a green card. But we're going to look at the national level.
I am very very cautiously optimistic about this new government. I can't think of a single time since 1975 when there was a government that might be willing and able to act like this is a real adult grown-up country. Not even because of Hezbollah. They were just a symptom. The real problem was the Assad regime. There was no way Lebanon could even try to improve itself as long as that existed. They had their tentacles into every part of society. I don't expect we're gonna see true democracy like the USA in 1864 break out tomorrow, but this is legit the first time most of the people in this country could even begin to start trying to make progress in reforming their political system. I mean heck, they might even start breaking down the barriers between the religious sects like everyone has been promising to do since 1943.
There's a lot of dangers left though. Hezbollah and Assad getting the shit kicked out of them brings a lot of opportunities but there's a lot of potential ways to frick this up. I know I'm a nattering nabob of negativity, but I've been saying for decades that when we get rid of them we have to have a plan for how to replace them.
One immediate concern is the Alawis in Lebanon. They have a neighborhood in Tripoli. The population is, I dunno, maybe 10k. There was a lot of fighting between them and the local (Sunni) population several years ago. Not to mention during the Civil War. Now they're totally isolated deep in the territory of people who have really intense reasons to hate them. There's been a lot of cases of isolated communities like this getting massacred. Although on the bright side, those were during wartime and since the Alawis are no real threat to them anymore they'll probably be fine.
Second is the Shi'a. It's difficult for me to follow what's going on with them because they don't post much in English unless it's straight-up propaganda like al-Manar. What I know is, most of them have zero interest in Hezbollah's corruption, its wars, its heresies imported from Iran, its weirdo restrictions on your social life, among other things. They backed them because there is a real legitimate fear among everyone that the other two sects will gang up and wipe you out. The Lebanese Shi'a now have no friends in the world except Iran, which is completely impotent at the moment with a regime bankrupt financially and morally and on the edge of collapse. In my boomer times, the US would have stepped in to reassure these people that they're not about to get genocided.
Third is the Israelis doing their usual bullshit. Signed a "cease-fire" and kept firing. I guess the implicit understanding was if Hezbollah stops shooting rockets they'll stop blowing away all the apartment buildings in Beirut. In the news they report every little detail of the treaty, but it's understood that most of those are just for show and won't be followed. But Israeli domestic politics once again goes against its national interests. They're not going to leave a couple of the villages on the border that they promised to in the cease-fire. This is very typical of Israeli diplomacy: Always break every agreement a little bit just to remind them that you've got the upper hand and they can't do anything about it. Which dooms them to eventually be in constant war with everyone, but at least in the case of Smotrich and Ben Gvir that's exactly the point. The people they forced out of these villages, Christians and Muslims, are not just going to forget about it. And there's already psycho fringe Israelis trying to build settlements there. They're the fringe now, but once they've got facts on the ground, they'll make sure this keeps going for generations.
Fourth is what Hezbollah does when they're in a corner. In 2006 they won a conventional war which was incredibly shocking. Now their conventional army is destroyed. If they go back to fighting, they're gonna go back to guerilla warfare. And they're really good at that. And if they're really desperate, they'll go back to terrorism. You dipshits call them a "terrorist organization" because you think "terrorist" is a synonym for "bad". They stopped doing terrorism a long time ago but it's not because they found Jesus and became nice. If they get desperate they'll go back to it. And it won't be in Israel.
Hopes
Everything is going right for Lebanon right now except for Israel continuing to bomb them. If the cabinet there just has anybody who wants to accept that they won a war and not prolong it, everything will be fine. The ball is in their court.
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Can't breed
Here's a bunch of statistics I made up in my head why its always foids fault
You don't understand, I just CANNOT take a shower and maybe a nice haircut and not walk around in the smelliest most unfashionable pants in existence. It's LITERALLY everyone else who's wrong
Weird thing is some women will still go after the guy for financial stability and still cheat. We live in a world where majority of people want their cake and eat it too.
Foids bad m'kay
I had to fact-check the "no civilization if not MONOGAMOUS" thing.
Well... turns out he is correct for the most part.
Many consider the first human civilization to have been the Sumerians, in Mesopotamia, 4000-3500B.C.
Sumerian civilization had monogamous marriages, but if wife could not have children, you could take another spouse with 1st spouse remaining at higher rank.
Keeps fricking going for another 10 or 12ish wordswordswords
who ever downrated this is a morron and cant handle the truth
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- Arran : black lives matter
- novie : gay metashit (and that's a good thing)
- Horned_waifus_shill : /h/meta
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RED ALERT!!! OLDEST SPAL VICTIM KNOWN TO DATE ALSO HAS A PEEPEE!!!! Rachel (he/him) then cucks him mid-speech about how it's totally a hermaphrodite dooood not a
with a shenis!1!1!!
!metashit eat up!
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https://github.com/deepseek-ai/Janus/blob/main/janus_pro_tech_report.pdf
USA lost, China Won, glory to the CCP!
Orange Site:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42843131
BREAKING: DeepSeek officially announces another open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.
β The Kobeissi Letter (@KobeissiLetter) January 27, 2025
This model generates images and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across multiple benchmarks. pic.twitter.com/FSJkelcaYP
NEWS: DeepSeek just dropped ANOTHER open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.
β Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) January 27, 2025
It's multimodal (can generate images) and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks.
This comes on top of all the R1 hype. The π is cookin' pic.twitter.com/yCmDQoke0f
JUST IN:
β Megatron (@Megatron_ron) January 27, 2025
Another blow is coming from the Chinese DeepSeek AI
They launched now a multimodal "Janus-Pro-7B" model with image input and output. pic.twitter.com/akEfi9Zyzq
π¨
β Liang Wenfeng ζ’ζι (@LiangWenfeng_) January 27, 2025
DeepSeek just dropped ANOTHER open-source AI model, Janus-Pro-7B.
It's multimodal (can generate images) and beats OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion across GenEval and DPG-Bench benchmarks. pic.twitter.com/HVB1wBns1z
DeepSeek open-sources Janus Pro, beating Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's DALL-E 3π€― pic.twitter.com/C50jQGHOHl
β Casper Hansen (@casper_hansen_) January 27, 2025
WAIT A SECOND, DeepSeek just dropped Janus 7B (MIT Licensed) - multimodal LLM (capable of generating images too) π₯ pic.twitter.com/2kzaCJfLPt
β Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav (@reach_vb) January 27, 2025
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104075936
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104077316
https://boards.4chan.org/g/thread/104077293
https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1ibd5x0/deepseek_releases_deepseekaijanuspro7b_unified/
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ibe4j7/deepseek_drops_multimodal_januspro7b_model/
https://old.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1ibfed1/news_deepseek_just_dropped_another_opensource_ai/
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1ibdyou/deepseek_just_dropped_janus_7b_mit_licensed/
https://hexbear.net/post/4363677?scrollToComments=false
https://hexbear.net/post/4364578?scrollToComments=false
BlueSky:
DeepSeek has released a new set of multimodal AI models that it claims can outperform OpenAIβs DALL-E 3.The models are part of a new model family that DeepSeek is calling Janus-Pro. They range in size from 1 billion to 7 billion parameters.Read more here: tcrn.ch/40Bc5Qm
β TechCrunch (@techcrunch.com) 2025-01-27T21:38:20.589Z
https://rdrama.net/post/337205/deepseek-drops-multimodal-januspro7b-model-beating
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The South African did another heckerino - in response reddit jannies have taken up their mops in protest to "petition" their userbase about a total ban on Twitter/X links. Numerous subs have already joined, including but not limited to:
r/antiwork (carp added this one with jannie abuse powers hi!!!!!)
Is this totally organic? Will it accomplish anything? Doesn't matter, it's a reddit protest!!
- Wojak : YWNBAW
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So my wife (29f) and i (28m) have been together with the exception of a long break when we were 18 and 19 for 10 years. (She left me for another guy) and every year or two since we've been back together i keep finding things on her phone. The first was a fetlife account where she was chatting with multiple men. The second was a coworker she was speaking explicitly with. Third she asked a random neighbor out for coffee in our apartment complex in a flirting manner. And finally this. I found nudes of her that I'd never seen before, and looked in the deleted pictures on her phone and found pictures of another man's nudes.
We've had some rough patched with my finances and depression as well as hers. I must admit I was feeling sexually frustrated last year and went to a "massage parlor" but didn't go through with the end part. And she found out. She's insists that nothing has become physical any of these times and would leave if she were going to go through with it, because she did when thats what she wanted.
Our relationship is great except for this horrible bi annual ritual of her seeking attention. She makes the money In the relationship and I'm very limited in my capacity to support myself for any sort of trial separation. I don't want to leave. I love her. But I feel I need to advocate for myself despite my own wrongdoings. I feel so trapped and hopeless.
Came across this amazing post. But what's even funnier is if you visit his profile and see the only other post he's made:
This might be the dumbest man on Earth.
Oh, he's from Portland? She's not cheating on him; he's just unknowingly in a poly relationship.
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Why do I feel like I time traveled back to the 70s?? pic.twitter.com/jLvPQfOum0
— The Bruiser (@DrHoosierHermit) February 2, 2025
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They are kicking and screaming. They are insomniacs. They are constantly hyperventilating and they are wound up and high strung. They are weak. They pray to God day and night about how worried and scared they are about every little thing. They think what they worship is good but they are enslaved and captured by fear and they worship ideas and narratives created by evil human beings. They worship fear power control and authoritarianism and are scared shitless. They believe when they die they are going to Heck for eternity they truly believe it and life is about burying yourself in distractions and illusions from this monumentally devestating truth. They are brain dead they got a bullet in their head
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GeorgeFloydSoulLeftHimNah
: Gimmickstrags like you deserve to rope in ACK!
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When you goon you're performing a political act and the way you coom says a lot about you, your values, and your place in a shared community. We need to take your views and considerations into account when designing a equitable future for our children. However, when it's time for COOM. There's no need for any of that. You don't even need clothes. Just bring your hands.
For centuries we've had debates on how to handle the powers of COOM. Some cultures let GOONERs run free, as you see with the Sentinelese. They live the perfect life for gooners. NAKED all day long. Boobas on display. No work, no insurance, no renewing medical aid schemes, no Alexander Forbes foundation, just coom. Other cultures have tried to hold back gooners, eventually these became traditions like marriage and with that, r*pe became illegal which changed the game for gooners forever. That began the evolutionary arms race between GOONERS and FEDS. And if that's not bad enough, you've got to worry about OPPs trying to take your GOONING customers from you bruh. You can't learn the coom hustle in school you've got to live this shit aint no textbooks on gooning like we goon in this b-word.
Nah but Imma keep it 100% wichu this site good ya'll lil bros doing ya'lls thang just don't get too big for your boots. And remember to pay respects to the fallen soldiers in prison, dead, we've lost a lot of good brothers to this goon shit for real. We need unity. Aight imma light this blunt and goon hard. Shit's good as frick yo. Can't stop gooning. How much do you goon?
Now lastly, you gotta remember we categorize our gooners as either: organized, disorganized and mixed. My organized gooners got COOM calenders and sheeit. they're all about that OPSEC because they're paranoid about the feds. Me? I'm a DISORGANIZED coomer. If I meet with the feds I'm gooning it out and until then, I'm gonna EJACULATE BLOOD WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT.
Stay cumming for real. And PIRATE your PORN DON'T PAY NOT ONE DIME SHARE THAT SHIT NEIGHBOR
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I JUST FOUND OUT THAT PUFF IS NOT ALLOWED TO MAKE OR COLLECT MONEY WHILE HEβS LOCKED UP SO IβMA SEND HIS HALF OF THE MONEY TO JUSTIN
— ye (@kanyewest) February 7, 2025
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Holy shit it is bleak. There are three Harry Potter books in there and two Hunger Games books in there in the top 10 best books.
Then you compare it to the best books of the 20th century ( still one harry potter book in there in top 10 but they are still doing way better than the 21st century.
How did the quality of the "greatest" works fall down so quickly. It is like humanity has forgotten how to write anything with any depth anymore and it is all at the level of quality of teenage story writing.
Is it simply over for the writing genre as a whole or is it that the best quality writing is actually no longer being recognized as the best because it didn't sell enough copies nor got enough appreciation from writing critics, or is it that there is a complete disconnect between what the average person considers enjoyable writing and what is considered actually good high brow writing?
I think it is a shift in medium where all the people looking for depth and high quality in their literary works moved on to movies and video games instead and all who are still hanging around the writing genre are those who will pick a random niche and the general books based on lowest common denominator which is teenage angst or teenage wonderment slop.
What this means is that the writing genre is going to keep going further down in quality over time and we need to look at the possible extinction of reading one day if everything turns out to be possible to be done by video because people are clearly getting worse at appreciating literature while getting a whole lot better at their expectations and appreciation of better video entertainment content.
Conclusion:
In terms of ease of entry into the writing department this is the easiest time period. In terms of making money from it, likely one of the harder time periods. We can expect the quality of writing meant for general audiences to have reached the lowest floor and never rise above it again this generation. The Zoom zooms are too r-slurred when it comes to quality writing in just a book.
Also if you still read Harry Potter books, READ ANOTHER BOOK!
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Unrelated:
https://fordauthority.com/2025/02/ford-rival-jeep-rolls-out-in-vehicle-pop-up-ads/
frick stellantis, they're going bankrupt. also harrison ford takes massive peepee
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The @DOGE team discovered, among other things, that payment approval officers at Treasury were instructed always to approve payments, even to known fraudulent or terrorist groups.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 1, 2025
They literally never denied a payment in their entire career.
Not even once. https://t.co/kInoGWdw4C
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So recently there was a post that got removed from /r/RPG about how punching nazis is a great thing so you should buy my stuff and I'll give 5% of the money to a good cause. You know, the anti-capitalist way.
Well, that post got jannied; only the jannies were very keen for the sub to know that while they do it for free, they didn't do that for free - it was done by the admiggers who, unlike the jannies, get paid to mop. The jannies of /r/rpg then pinned the seethepost to the top of the sub to ensure everyone knows that they do it for free.
This then caused a bunch of extra virtue signalling nazi resisting to pop up, including:
Remaking the post under a "cleverly" reworded title
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1idsqfk/physically_resist_a_specific_brand_of/
Someone just linking to the bundle and going "updoots to the left" in possibly the laziest poast
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1idr5tw/bundle_of_holding/
A post linking to a "game" that isn't a game, just a political screed. Most egregiously, it lets you play as a jo*rnalist.
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1idum5h/survive_the_tyrant_an_rpg_about_resisting/
And finally, another re-linking to the bundle but this time with even more seething about the admins
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1idtaov/since_it_appears_that_reddits_admins_love_nazis/
One comment on that thread is promoting the game Eat the Reich which is... not good as notepad anon summarizes:
needless to say /r/rpg has put them at the top of the thread
and a bonus opportunity for ban evasion!
There's also this post that also promotes ETR in the most safe-edgy way I can think of
https://old.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1ie0lpm/eat_the_reich_clarification_humor/
And while we're on the subject of "antifascist RPGs that you have to buy for some reason" don't forget to check out @MayflyAlt-98's post about the hilariously bad SIGMATA: This Signal Kills Fascists
https://rdrama.net/h/traditionalgames/post/203355/sigmata-this-signal-kills-fascists-marseysal
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So I met up with this off Grindr and fricked him.
mtf, stereotype, communist, neurodivergent, type shit
Dude was rambling about some nonsense, and I just nodded along, waiting to get it over with. About an hour in, we got down to business and I fricked his butt (with a condom, obviously).
Tbh I felt kind of disgusted, but you know, neighbors just gotta take what they can get
It is what it is.
To find the mystical true femboy (biological male that passes as female with the exception of the peepee)
But as it turns out, they don't really exist or at least, they're so incredibly rare they might as well not exist
It's like finding a cryptid, but at the same time, trying to find that true femboy is almost addictive...
It's like gambling, trying to hit the jackpot.
"Maybe the next one... maybe just a few more profiles..."
Darn
Trans QUEEN in question. Dilapidated room , dirty carpet and greasy pikachu plushy an all!
!chuds lost another soldier in the r-slur war.....