There are moments when Nate goes completely cold and he is way scarier than any of them, or all the rest of them combined, like a reminder of what is sitting there under the surface - an incomparably brilliant mind with no heart to anchor it and nothing to believe in.
you can tell that Nate is an ex-Jesuit, or perhaps more accurately an almost-Jesuit
He has this Catholic self-hatred coupled with this deeply rooted sense he’s better than others and it’s all tied together with a large amount of ‘here, hold my beer’
“My father would buy me an ice-cream” is just the the most terrifying thing anyone in the show says.
He says, in one line, that he was raised to be bad, knows how to be bad, chose to be good, fell, chose to be good by doing bad, but his gut reflex, the one he’s been supressing for his entire life, is just to be a walking nightmare, exactly what you’d expect if you rewarded a child for lying, cheating, swindling, and hurting for fun and profit.
Nate Ford is not a nice man. But he’s all that’s standing between us and Jimmy Ford’s Son, so let’s be thankful for that.
Leverage AU where Nate does go into the priesthood … but still ends up doing the same thing.
“Bless me, father, for I have sinned.”
“Go on.”
“I knocked over a liquor store.”
“And why did you do that?”
“Well my mom’s sick. We can’t afford the pain medication, and I know alcohol is a bad pain reliever, but I don’t know how to break into a pharmacy, so …”
“OK, my son, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to get your mom her medicine. But I’m going to need your help. I need you to call the health insurance company, and tell them —“
Lying should only be performed out of necessity, and in my experience, humans tend to be very poor judges of their own behaviour.
have you considered shutting the fuck up lmao
“You should only lie when absolutely necessary” are you nine?
Just an honest gal tryin’ her best to live an honest life. Now where in the world did you get the idea that lying was done for shits and giggles?
Because I do it for shits and giggles, tons of people lie for fun, for amusement, to make others feel better… None of which are “necessary” but make the world a better place
next you’ll say “stealing is wrong unless you’re starving”
Okay, let’s say that storytelling is a form of lying, except that both/all parties are aware of the lie and play along with it, like make-believe. I’m talking about situations where there is no consent between the liar and lieé, so to speak. I’m sure you can see the difference.
And I stand by what I say about absolute necessity, except I wouldn’t go so far as life and death, not necessarily. Sometimes it’s just a matter of doing what’s right in a particular situation, such hurting someone’s feelings if they knew the truth. In such cases you must weigh the respective benefits of lying and telling the truth very carefully, and sometimes lying is the rational compassionate choice. We want to be certain in our hearts it’s the right thing to do, but like I said, humans (present company included) tend to be very poor judges of such things, which is why I try to avoid non-consensual lying whenever possible.
“Non-consensual lying” lmao
I’ll lie to a stranger all I like if I find it amusing, especially if it doesn’t harm them. Not necessary, not harmful. But they also didn’t “consent.” It’s not wrong or right, it’s just a thing you can do. (And I’m going to read your response in the best face possible and assume you’re not trying to weaponize consent culture language for something like “is it okay to lie”)
Like, I grew up and moved on from Kantian philosophy to more grown up views, and left behind that kind of absolutism. I am BEGGING tumblr folks to stop this kind of behavior, blanketing swaths of neutral/benign behaviors that can be used for good, bad or for neutral reasons.
My second longest-lasting relationships is based on “commitment to the bit.” We lie about dumb shit because it’s funny. We even lie about shit for no reason. Because it’s funny.
I once in a group setting made a joke about only having one testicle, as one had to be removed in a tragic sexual accident. My ex-partner was in that group and was laughing along with me when other people had no idea I was making a joke. (Yes, lies can be jokes.) But the people that weren’t in on it were fucking HOWLING with laughter as I took someone down a journey that was all lies. (Also, fun fact, I committed to the bit so hard that this particular ex ROUTINELY thought I had one testicle until I corrected them.)
Lying is fun, stop trying to moralize every type of social interaction. Your life will be better, I promise. And I say this as someone who cares very deeply about being a good person.
From the substack post above, which contains the link to a preprint of the academic article:
When I began my research, I planned to compare the experiences of asexual men, asexual women, and “beyond the binary” asexuals. I ended up interviewing 77 people under the asexuality umbrella.
But there was a major problem. About a third of the people I interviewed didn’t really fit into any gender category.
These individuals felt that gender presentation and/or identity was unimportant, pointless, and/or oppressive. They didn’t want to be understood through the lens of gender. I ended up coining the term “gender detachment” to describe these feelings (though, as some you helpfully pointed out, there are other terms, like autigender, neutrois, etc. that get at similar ideas).
Wizard: [Fighter], do you have anything we can use to make a fire? There’s plenty of wood here, can you maybe do something with the metal door hinges and a stone??
Me, the DM: ……[wizard], make an intelligence check.
Wizard: 15?
Me: ……..you recall that you know the firebolt cantrip which is often used to set things on fire.
D&D alignment is famously dumb, to the point where in literal decades I’ve only ever heard it discussed to dump on it or joke about it, but designing esoteric cosmic alignment systems for RPGs is very fun in that it appeals to the nerd’s natural delight in taxonomy and mysticism. anyway my favourite one that I ever came up with, which I have yet to deploy in a finished work but still want to, is an alignment trinity that goes like this:
ROCK: associated with moralistic heroes and heroism, personal virtue, romanticism, himbos, babyface wrestlers, beach bodies, unarmed combat or purely cosmetic weapons, doing the simplest or most ethical thing without regard for the consequences, hot-blooded shonen protagonists who are 14, even numbers, the colours red and green
SCISSORS: associated with “bad guys”, cunning, pragmatic and ruthless self-interest, heel wrestlers, “edginess”/antiheroics, lethal weapons (especially blades and guns), surprise attacks, lies and betrayal, decisive lateral solutions, the ends justifying the means, odd numbers, the colours black and blue
PAPER: associated with bureaucrats and institutions, “The Man”, proceduralism for its own sake, dense codes of law, deciding what to do on the basis of abstract theory, Ayn Rand villains, inconvenient traditions, intellectualism and pseudointellectualism, co-optation by the establishment, art that only makes sense if you know art history, nonsense as distinct from lies, domestication of conflict, non-integers, the colours white and yellow
These form a kind of daoist element phase pattern where one is considered to “beat” the other and things transition according to that pattern, in the expected way.
This hits what I think is a sweet spot for design, where it feels plausibly transcendental in the sense that you can kind of let your eyes unfocus and genuinely imagine that these categories embody deep wisdom about the nature of the world, and it’s elegant in that the aesthetics line up with the names of the categories in both metaphorical and literal ways, but it’s also just visibly incredibly stupid and a joke, so you can enter into a superposition of taking it seriously within the narrative while considering it stupid and deflating.
ALT