Why not both?
Anyway, I was thinking less 'european aristocrat' and more 'steampunk aesthetics' when I talked about vests. Dress shirt, tie, vest, and overcoat, all slightly stained with oil from physically impossible doohickeys full of gears. T'is a nice aesthetic.
But you don't need to be following the news personally.
Many people around you are.
Those people have this perception, and so they act accordingly. You are looking at memes? Well it's a matter of hours until you see a meme about wanting to die on 196 or whatever. You watching TV Shows? Yeah TV Shows are entirely drunk on the zeitgeist and the zeitgeist is one of despair.
Ergo. You are surrounded by people who think everything is fucked (tm) -- And therefore you'll also feel like everything is fucked (tm)
Both can be true.
F'course, pills won't fix society, but medics can't really fix the social systems. Best they've got is pills that make you not want to die.
Because you are staring at the pain rectangle and being bombarded with every bad thing that is happening in the entire planet nonstop.
Your ape brain was not meant for this. Imagine if you lived in the 1300s -- Plague, famines, wars, pogroms. They had it all. But any one human being would only ever hear about whatever bad things were happening near to them.
Did you have vests though?
Humanity went wrong when we abandoned vests.
In Brazil, the sweet, puffy ones are american pancakes (Panqueca Americana)
Because what we call pancake (unembelished 'Panqueca') is much closer to this thin pancake you're showing off. -- Except we make the batter with salt and fill it with savoury things like cheese or meat and roll it up in a... Roll. Closer to a burrito really.
The internet has really fucked my brain, because the first thing that comes up in my head is an old meme of The Orange One (back when he hadn't been president yet, and so was funny instead of scary) saying "CHINA CHINA CHINA CHINA CHINA" (sorry)
AFTER that -- Disney's Mulan, and all the orientalist aesthetics that come with it (sorry²)
And AFTER that -- Years of internet discourse trying to convince me that a growth in Chinese international power would be worse than the US holding that position alone, which I find EXTREMELY hard to believe as a third world citizen whose home nation has been fucked in the butthole by the Americans like seven different times in lived memory (NOT sorry)
Then AFTER that -- The stories told by my one friend who lived there for a few months. To be honest they made China seem like a pretty cool place to live in. Or at the very least, a fun experience as an exchange student.
And AFTER all that -- Bootleg video games. They are interesting!
The country is Brazil.
If you are unfortunate enough to live in the favelas (aka: Very very poor in a big city), you'll be under their thrall.
But the little secret is that.... They end up being not that different from the government. They have their own 'laws', and if you follow them, you'll be left alone. Their protection rackets become like taxes, except instead of going to jail for not paying, you'll get tortured -- And you might even benefit from them in a way.
A friend of mine tells a story about doing social work in a favela, and how after years of neglect from the government resulting in kids from the place not getting vaccinated, the local crimelord bought the vaccines with his own money and had his own paralell vaccination campaign for everyone that was properly paying their protection money. Hopefully you won't catch a stray bullet when the illegal liege lord of your neighbourhood-fiefdom is at war with the police or another neighbourhood-fiefdom's illegal lord for the umpteenth time that year.
If you are not in the favela....
... Well.... If you buy weed from a dealer or borrow money from illegal lenders and don't pay your bills, they'll probably abduct you and break your legs.
If you do none of those things... You might get pickpocketed or mugged, but that is honestly the extent of interactions that I, a rich boy from the third world, have had with the criminal factions of my country. Muggings. Being threatened and told to hand over my phone (which I did, I'm not stupid). Having a gameboy swiped from my bag while at an anime con.
Inhabitant of a 3rd world country here
I don't think "kidnapped and tortured by the government" is a thing we've done much of since the US stopped funding our far right dictatorship in the 80s (and the military immediately fucked off and 'let democracy take its course' when the funding dried up).
.... Let us not speak of what our criminal factions get up to though.
"EXPENSIVE Candy"
It's like Free candy, but better because it's expensive, don'cha know
Copypasting an intentionally hingeless rant I sent in a group-chat some years back:
I do not care for the ocean... But most of the ocean is just sorta THERE. They're ugly and freaky but they just do their thing because they are brainless. Someitmes literally. The Man-o-War has giant building-sized tentacles because it LITERALLY does not have a brain, and so compensates by being a living fishing net. You gonna hate on a creature that doesn't even know it exists? Like sure, do that, but it's like being angry at a rock.
Dolphins though? Dolphins are different. Dolphins have tasted of the fruit of knowledge, on the same day humans, corvids, rats, and elephants ate the fruit and were cast out of paradise, the Dolphins crawled out of the sea, climbed the tree with their little flippers, and gorged themselves on those forbidden fruits.
Dolphins have complete knowledge of good and evil. AND THEY HAVE CHOSEN EVIL.
Dolphins hunt for sport and leave their kills to rot.
Dolphins use live blowfish as dolphin weed.
Dolphins rape animals, not limited to other dolphins, but interspecies rape too.
AND dolphins get all sorts of special treatment from idiot humans who think that because they are squeaky and can jump through hoops, they must be like doggos from the ocean. In reality they are the spawn of Satan upon this world.
Cheekily "fixing" this post
Waow (basedbasedbasedbased)