ggtdbz

I have written a few comments about day to day life in Lebanon as we’re being bombed and now invaded by an indiscriminate killing machine. This war has more surreal than anything I’ve lived through: more surreal than the post-blast week, more surreal than peak lockdown season, more surreal than any of the waves of civil conflict throughout my life. I have never felt more guilty for every breath of air I take and every hug I give my family. People, normal civilian people like me, are losing everything, often their lives.

More surreal: an Arabic sweet shop I go to very often (it’s on a main highway) got damaged by an attack this week. It’s in the middle of a very safe city. Like imagine your favorite something just had to close from war damage. Good thing the indiscriminate killing machine didn’t suspect that terrorists were hiding in the baklawa. Maybe next week they’ll find them and finish the job.

Would you fucking believe it if I told you I get DMs from people “sympathizing with my hardships” but asking me if I could kindly remove my post because of some US election shenanigans.

Some people will just never understand that there is a whole world outside the Global North full of complex people and situations. I like not being bombed for the crime of not being a European colonist. But writing about it in English online? Must be a psyop huh. At least this isn’t Reddit where a few years back someone actually questioned whether I could really be Lebanese if I was writing so much in decent English. Truly le euphoric intellectual site.

And hey if I was an American voter I’d probably still cast an unenthusiastic ballot for the cop if I was in a battleground state. I get it, I hate the other guy, it would be morally gray, but no grayer than the options we get to vote for here. But that doesn’t mean this absurd defense of the indiscriminate killing machine, spewing forth from every corner of the woodwork, hasn’t really highlighted how the US just has two right wing parties. You guys (Americans) should be reframing the Vietnam protests as a cute little Sunday picnic compared to what you should be doing now. Which they were.

You have to hold these ghouls accountable and the “nice democratic countries’” fetish for pretend civility has never been more exhausting. You think in the annals of history they’re going to say “good thing they didn’t whip out the nooses, that would have been so beneath our perfect empire”? Of course not. It would just be correctly understood as appeasement. When the indiscriminate killing machine is properly listed next to Rhodesia and Nazi Germany, the fervent support the world showed them will be a rightful, eternal humiliation for every country that has been rewarding them for tearing our families and limbs apart.

Or hey, maybe we get wiped off the map and get all our towns renamed to someone else’s language. And we are removed from the history books. Clearly our lives are just acceptable collateral for people playing what should ostensibly be a very important political game. If that’s what our lives are worth, what is our memory worth?

All of the car’s interior lighting (all in amber) does dim automatically when I drive under a bridge or into a tunnel, and automatically dims when I turn on the headlights. So some rudimentary dimming was implemented in 2000 when it was made. No clue where the sensor is though.

A lot of complaints around release were that the game wasn’t as complex as Oblivion or Morrowind, to the point that it was a disappointment for more hardcore players.

I once read a comment on the old site about how Skyrim’s combat is like mashing WWE action figures together.

I completely agree but I don’t think that’s a weakness at all. Maybe when it released, the game was seen as a grand RPG by more casual people and as a watered down Oblivion by older ES players.

But I think by looking at it not through the lens of a grand RPG, but as a familiar, comforting brain-off experience, it really shines. It really gave us the most it could for how low effort it is to play, and I mean that in a good way.

I remember getting recommended a YouTube video (by the algorithm) called something like “why do we still like Skyrim” and I thought the video was very disappointing. And I think the video’s thesis was about the same as mine in this comment. I wanted it to be something like this:

I associate the game with a long tradition of RPGs that I wasn’t around for, as one of the last great games we got before the priorities of the industry shifted again. The graphics didn’t need to be perfect, the comically small number of VAs didn’t need AI bullshit, the straightforward story lines don’t need to be groundbreaking. The music and atmosphere though are immaculate. It’s a game with a ton of flaws, even some jank that is endearing in hindsight. It just works!

Throw on the modding aspect and you have a very “pure” PC gaming experience. This is exactly what I want from a game, something that’s good enough to just be fun to run around aimlessly in, without feeling like I need a podcast to play in the background, that I can just lose hours in.

I’m playing a much higher effort game now. Workers and Resources Soviet Republic makes the Cities Skylines 2 look like drawing stick figure houses. WRSR is absurdly complex and is super engrossing when you’re in it, if you’re wired to enjoy these types of games. However, I need to be mentally ready to jump in.

With Skyrim I just launched it when I was bored, and I was less bored after.

I insist: Skyrim’s simplicity is what made it work.

That’s exactly the kind of display I’m talking about. Nice to see they’re still around.

The ones I have are all just grids, higher resolution than these but still comfortingly blocky. I’ve actually replaced the dash display recently since the original one got deep fried under the sun and lost all contrast when the weather was above 20°C.

Newer, but I quite like the gentle amber LCD (not LED) displays of my car. At night it’s bright enough and sharp enough without being visually loud. I wish more of these displays were still being made, I’d love to use them in car-centric Arduino projects and data displays that would be consulted at night or that sort of thing.

I always ask my friends “How the fuck do you live like this?” when I hop into a car and the music UI is a garish color searing itself into my retinas permanently.

Thankfully, advertising companies have identified this marginal comfort I find in the warm interior lighting of my car and have proceeded to mount insultingly blinding screens all over the city.

The city being the midrise urban sprawl north of Beirut. What do you mean regulations on brightness habibi? You think you live in Paris? Imagine this: half the street is unlit because the power is out, but the advertising company’s invasive bullshit budget™ has enough foreign cash to burn to keep generators running all night for these shitty ads. Gotta beam an extra few kilowatts of photons straight into this sleepy driver’s eyeballs while they operate a motor vehicle, on a highway that a lot of people cross by foot. There’s a special on fish at the fancy supermarket, how will I live without that knowledge?

~~Thankfully, the “state” of Israel has identified that the civilian structures of Lebanon mildly inconvenienced me, and has proceeded to~~

Relevant, from a comment I wrote below that is buried under too many other comments:

If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.

Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.

You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.

Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.

This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.

Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.

If going to jail is the penalty for not joining the IDF, it is the moral thing to do and should be worn like a badge of honor. It’s not complicated at all unless you literally have a death penalty for not joining. I don’t care how controversial this is: if as an IDF terrorist you don’t commit a mutiny, desert, or off yourself, congratulations, you’ve net increased the evil in the world.

Sympathizing with the IDF is 1:1 the exact same as sympathizing with the SS and anyone who says otherwise has both fingers in their ears and yelling nanananana until the crunching noises under their bulldozers stop.

You cannot be systematically eradicating a people you consider inferior and also pretend you have any moral high ground. You cannot bomb hospitals and ambulances and homes and schools and pretend like you are the good guy. You cannot set up viewing platforms to have your kids watch the destruction with your own eyes and claim to be the good guy.

Not to make this about me but I’ve been running myself ragged volunteering at the shelters here in a safer part Lebanon and I’m still fucked up over feeling like I’m not doing enough. Rotting at home will make me feel even worse. I went outside for a walk and wanted to throw up, feeling guilty over being able to go outside and walk to destress as people’s homes get carpet bombed more intensely than legitimate military targets. I know damn well that if I lost my own home these shelters are full and I would have literally nowhere to go. And more people are losing their homes every hour. People are fleeing to Syria and Iraq for safety, even as the border crossings are getting hit as well.

This is beyond ”normal” human evil. If any other army was doing this we would have rows of criminals hanging from cranes in The Hague, instead we have to watch them smugly tell us we’re next in a speech from the UN. For the unforgivable crime of being born on land that apparently exists only for colonization.

Do not let anyone lie to you. A Holocaust is happening right now and it is exactly as evil as the one the Nazis committed.

The port blast was divine mercy compared to this waking nightmare. It was a sign of immense incompetence and the culmination of decades of neglectful systems failing to do the bare minimum and we got months of genuine solidarity among everyone in the months afterward. People, even if it was mostly naive and performative among some communities, found purpose in moving forward from a crime together.

Now it’s an apocalypse. So much of the city is gone. Tens of thousands of totally normal people have been robbed of their homes and possessions, and hundreds of thousands don’t know if their homes are next. This is ignoring all the deaths. Most people affected were already pretty poor. It’s so fucked. I live in a safe area and can no longer function as a human being. The bombing has been less and less muffled lately. I don’t know if I’m within a month or week or rounding error of losing my home, and this being a safe area, I have nowhere to flee to. I live where people flee to. This is the destination. I’m not rich enough to have foreign passport or a visa that will let me fly out and stay somewhere else.

I literally wake up, read a list of places and number of casualties, and throw up before my day even begins. I’m shaking 24 hours and sleeping maybe 4 per night. This morning the footage is many residential buildings crumbling with hoarse voices desperately thanking God for the missile not hitting them / screaming for God to not make them the next victims (in case you were wondering why you hear Allahu Akbar by bystanders in war videos. That’s what that ”oh my God” equivalent means in that context. Imagine hearing them in your own dialect... Yeah real comforting)

Consider this: my favorite confectionary shop, bang in the middle of a safe area with zero militant activity (or support!), got damaged in a series of strikes yesterday. Because the wrong person (allegedly a cash mule, the horror) was driving past it. If the point was only to hit paramilitary things, we wouldn’t be here.

The cruelty, as ever, is the point. We are being Lebensraumed while the world either watches in horror or claps fervently. But no real will to stop the crimes

Oh I was just going off of my first impressions of different places that I’ll have to pick from sooner or later.

The getting kicked out of the house thing is mainly an American stereotype but it’s there in many western countries I think. I remember a podcast where an American journalist who was in Iraq during the past decade talked about how the Iraqis didn’t understand where all the homeless Americans come from. Like don’t they have families? Communities? Do people just kick out the mentally ill instead of keeping them safe? Etc. It’s about the structure of society and people’s bonds together, not just the economics.

Kids getting murdered at school is 100% an America only stereotype

Stabbing and robbing we associate a bit more with Europe.

Quite a few people here (waning majority I think) also think of the west as an unlivable hotbed of sexual decadence and LGBT “delinquency” but we both know that’s not in the bad column.

I wasn’t trying to bash the US in particular. I feel like I’d like to live there someday. It’s more of the dilemma of finding a place to go. The real dream is for things to work here but that’s not happening anytime soon and sadly we have more incentive to leave and save our skin than to stay and build for the future.

And oh boy do we shit on each other here. It’s not even minority vs majority, it’s pluralities with localized minorities, it’s retaliatory violence echoing centuries of small conflicts. You have to pay mobs for basic services. And no, doesn’t need to be richer, discrimination is alive and well in even the poorest areas. And of course, the militia that protects your town one year can shake it down the next (but that’s on us to deal with, not on the western armchair generals online). It’s not as simple as good guy bad guy. In many ways, probably almost every way, we are a failed society. But on good days, it’s chill. When things line up, Lebanon just works, even if it’s just for a short time.

I don’t envy your current election situation and won’t comment on it.

Lebanon has been spiraling for some time, but I wouldn't say it's a dystopia. Or a utopia, of course. But it's genuine. People don't kick their kids out on the street at 18 like they apparently do in the US, kids don't get shot in school either. People don't get stabbed or mugged, sometimes harassed by beggars but there's usually not violent crime. More positively, there's a lot to do that isn't centered around making you pay for experiences. I feel like that might not be the case everywhere. At least when we're not being terrorized, Lebanon is... very chill. Chill with a side of feudalism, but that's not today's topic.

Most of us pull together, we have relatively tough social bonds from years of facing difficulties together. On paper everything is fucked: currency is worthless, terrible infrastructure, literal terrorist state looking to Lebensraum us with impunity, mob-run essential services. But I don't know how to leave this behind. I know how to live on 8 hours of electricity per day, I know how to ration bathing water and fuel. I don't know how to deal with the more complex shit I see people dealing with elsewhere online.

Like a ton of people move to Canada. Sure, I speak both English and French decently well. But isn't a house anywhere worth living prohibitively expensive? Our Canadian-Palestinian friends have been discriminated against for the past twenty years, am I going to have to live as a second class citizen? etc etc. Sure as a Lebanese Christian I think I'd get a pass where others won't, but I don't want a pass, I want a safe place to home. All I write here is from a place of relative privilege though. I don't deal with extra shit for being poor or from a religion whose followers tend to be poor, I'm not LGBT, I don't come from a border town, I wasn't born into a town or family that has tribalish skirmishes. It's easy for me to sit and wonder about immigration at my leisure.

There's also analysis paralysis, right. I can theoretically move to many countries. In practice, every place has pros and cons, and it looks like the cons keep piling up pretty much everywhere while the pros drop one by one. Although that applies to Lebanon as well. If I'm going to be struggling, where better to struggle than among friends and family, in the land I call home?

I was getting ready to take one look at these and write them off as looking just a little too sharp, but honestly, with how bleak the visionless hyperrealism of today is, the original design shines straight through. I might use this.

I played Grim Fandango about halfway through last year and I really liked it, although something else grabbed my attention.