I Used To Hate The World And I Was Happy When Everyone Died. But I Was Wrong, Because There Was One Person

"The transition from [the barter system to currency] is hard to understand; how can human cravings be fetishized into pieces of metal? The answer is elegant because it reveals not only the origin of money, but its character even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: 'It has long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings.' The first coins were minted and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with the image of their god and embodying his protective power. Containing such manna, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but vice-versa: since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.

The consequence of this was that 'now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace.' This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, 'who based the value of his life — and so of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins.' A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. 'Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world.'

If we replace 'immortality' with 'becoming real,' the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that [the ego does] not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.

The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves."

- David Loy, from "Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today." Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: An International Symposium, edited by Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Sandra A. Wawrytko, 1991.

i would try human meat if there were no repercussions and i would fuck my clone and i would do any of the weird philosophical shit you guys put in your polls. im a real go-getter in this sense

mad max brain rot

You’ve just joined an adventuring party. The rogue wordlessly gives you a handkerchief and slinks away. “Ah, it’s his way of handling his kleptomania. Instead of stealing things at random, he’ll be going specifically for that.”

for me it was the / cause it coulda just been MAGA pigs, the slash breaks it 

Usually i'm not one of those "this graffiti was actually done by a conservative" people but they honestly didn't even try here. The 666 gives it away

I have never cried that fucking hard over a show in years.

I fully FULLY support the divergence of this episode, it was a phenomenal example of adapting source material in a way that feels like “oh yeah this is what actually happened they just didn’t have time in the game for all of this holy shit”.

They expanded on the frankly easy to ignore implications of the game and showed us that life can still be even in the midst of fear and uncertainty and apathy and FUCKING EVERYTHING, they showed us goodness and survival out of love because THAT is what The Last Of Us is about.

Death is horrific and sudden and will rob you blind with nothing to salvage; but it isn’t always that. Death is also kind, even forgiving. “Satisfying”, in the words of Bill. Frank wasn’t brutalized this time around, Bill wasn’t left alone to his prior demons. We got to see a side of this universe that hasn’t been portrayed thus far and it wasn’t twenty years of violent tragedy.

It was twenty years of two men enduring and surviving together in a world that had gone to shit, but they still took the leap and held hands while they fell. Everything else, the journey to the bottom, came after and it came painlessly.

spiderman oc

Shooting Stars