I’m not sure what to think. Lindsey’s sister had been appointed to fill his seat after he suddenly passed away which feels like nepotism. She has a background helping the disabled but she is on the side of MAGA. Do you think she will be better or worse than Lady G.

Including a thread (https://x.com/analepsis1723/status/2079204162651181169?s=46) with other similar instances.

I keep getting Sophie Cunningham and Caitlin Clark hype videos fed to me by the YouTube algorithm cuz “me think Charles Barkley and Shaq R funny.”

Are CC and SC being used to push reactionary crap? The hype videos did feel kinda racist even though I guess CC was getting fouled pretty hard.

From “Naturalistica” - a 3-hr, 60-track opus from 🇨🇦

Recorded live and dawless

https://ektmusic.bandcamp.com/album/naturalistica

A 'Shoot & Cry' is a way for soldiers & supporters of empire to assuage their guilt for the killing of innocents, but the act itself is still portrayed as somewhat necessary and rational. The legitimacy of the systems that put the soldiers in danger is never challenged by the text.

I've seen a couple of posts on varying platforms claiming that Nolan's Odyssey is such a film, but that's not the case. Odysseus' war crimes bring about the end of his civilization. Opening the Pandora's Box of feigned hospitality as a military tactic turns all of Myceanean Greece into petty warlord sea peoples. Plundering murderers who transform their rule-of-law, palace economies into Mad Max, might make right, warlord fiefdoms.

American Sniper by contrast, shows the innocents Kyle kills as bearing a large part of the blame. They reveal hidden hand grenades that were meant for US soldiers, so Kyle HAD to kill them according to the film's text, but Nolan never does that in the Odyssey. Odysseus knows from day one that the Trojan War is purely for Agamemnon's greed. No Trojan truly poses a threat to the Greeks at any point. The fact they all could & should have just gone home is the text of the film.

You mean to tell me that you can’t plant drugs, break tail lights, intimidate/wire tap, street cop assault, racial profile but for a white person, or nothing? You’re not trying hard enough! These are rookie numbers!

👁️🇮🇱

I think this is great, given what we saw done to Maduro. If they are going to coup you they’ll just do it, wether you have real, fake, or no elections. Hope they got some real mfs lined up to fill Ortega and his wife’s shoes (hopefully a couple shoe sizes up, let’s be real Daniel has some issues) cuz dude is ancient. What do y’all think? I think it’s a good thing, but I’d hope there are solid enough foundations that the Sandinista revolution can now thrive… though it’s always more complicated. The Sandinista’s do have a solid hold on power, and I don’t see this being contested internally.

Old buddy I stay friends with as my canary in the coal mine to understand the mind of hogs.

As a staunch conservative, I believe IP law is the glue that holds this country together.

Did you just get invited to the cookout? Do you enjoy sitting your white ass down and listening? Are you a proud Birkenstock-American? Well if you answered yes to any of the above, I have the perfect playlist for you.

These are people who made a living being a mid level creative and doing what they love for years. Most seemingly were good folks and a bit on the spectrum, and now AI just fucking took that away from them.

And it's not even like what they were replaced with is good, it's just the most bottom of the barrel slop that looks like shit 90% of the time because the people making it don't want to make a second or third draft (house of the dragon marketing material and UFC comes to mind) because you replaced creatives with Gen X suits who think it's 'good enough'. It's all just shit. Even the WWE is starting to use generic AI slop for their entrance music thats so bad you could immediately tell it's AI and that's what they used to be good at.

I remember a few years back there was this artist with maybe a few hundred Karma that posted her drawing of a clown character that was kinda borderline NSFW but not really. It wasn't amazing but you could see that she had really put in the work to get proportions right and worked on it in her free time. She was talking about how people should buy art from artists and not just prompt it into AI and she was just being ignored after getting downvoted.

I tried finding the post again but it was gone and so was she. They probably made a few hundred dollars a month doing what they loved and learning to draw, they might have even wanted to become a full time artist later on, but that was taken away from them because AI slop could produce what she did at that time for free.

Then I go on this site and see artists with years of experience and with open commissions and no one is biting because their art isn't a polished as what AI could shit out and think fuck man, is this it? Is this all that trillions of dollars worth of investments and helping quicken our demise in the hands of global warming is going to get us? Ruining the lives of small time artists?

And the worst thing is, I can't even blame the average person for not wanting to pay hundreds of dollars for custom art when they have the slop machine that'll give them 90% of what they want for a flat fee of whatever Midjourney costs now.

It feels like eventually, we're just going to lose artists (at least those who draw) all together because why learn and put in the work if the computer will do it for you? Not like it was easy making a living doing it before but now, even if you have your own unique art style that you've spent years developing, someone could just shove it in a model and it'll allow anyone to recreate for pennies of what you would have made.

I know it's not the biggest problem with the world right now, it might not even be in the top 500, but fuck man idk, I just wanted to vent a bit I guess.

That's what was making me sick and achey. On amoxicillin now. I'm grateful I have so many people that care about me

When I was 18, my parents kicked me out of the house. Within days of my 18th birthday. They told me I was a man and that I needed to figure it out on my own. They told me that that was how the real world works. Men don't ask for help. Men struggle. Men do it alone. They told me that I would be accepted back into the family under one condition. I join the U.S. military. Why? Because it would make me a man. Make me an adult. It would, in my parents own words, "finally give us something to be proud about." It would make me a proper soldier. This was their vision. I can't deny that seeing a 19-year-old get blown the fuck up by an Iranian missile for no other reason than, hey, somebody's gotta load those bombs that kill those schoolgirls, right? It hits a little bit different when you have been in that uniform, been in a position where you feel like that is the only available choice to you, because that's what I did. I enlisted right then. It felt like the only option I had. I had other options. You always have a choice. I could have ran the fuck away. I could have tried my best to escape, but in those material circumstances, that was what I felt was the only option for me. I never wanted to do it.

It was the parental pressure. It was the idea that doing this thing makes you a good person, makes you an adult, makes you a man. I could finally make my folks proud. There is definitely a strong Southern masculinity bit to it. But still, I try to think about the type of parent that pushes for their child to enlist. Because in my graduating class, after high school was over, a lot of people went and enlisted, all with the same recruiter that was in our high school four or five times during my junior year, four or five times during my senior year, making the pitch, making the sales, if you will. I mean, this man had direct contact with my parents and my mother. Who knows what he was telling her? And all for what? So I could have the potentiality of killing and maiming and hurting another human being? Because that's what makes me a man in America? Rugged individualism to the point where you threaten to disown your own kin if they're not able to kill and maim and be broken down and rebuilt to have those desires, that sense of courage, if you will, to load the bomb.

I'm not proud of what I did, even if I never really did anything. I never went overseas, I never deployed. The only time I did actively was during flood rescue missions. But still, having worn that uniform, I can tell you that it is a shameful thing to do. But that isn't a shame that was necessarily my own choice, even if I should have had the wherewithal to flee. I think that is what makes it harder to sit with. I wonder what her parents were like, how her family feels about the fact that she was killed. Because I'm wondering what my parents would think if it was me in her shoes.

Sorry if this is bad or whatever and it will probably get deleted, but went to a really late showing and got out at 2AM and I was driving home and at one point I'm coming down a freeway overpass and a homeless guy jumps out at me trying to [redacted] himself and I swerved out of the way...I was like feet away and saw the look of trepidation and fear on his face, he sort of doubled back at the last second

I don't know I rarely feel anything anymore for anyone or anything but that shit really fucked me up, came close to losing it for the first time in a long time

life is just so fucking brutal and cruel and writing doesn't seem to help

I need to stop eating cheese before bed.

Please ignore that the director is Israeli. No politic here!

https://www.screendaily.com/features/how-israels-eran-riklis-made-reading-lolita-in-tehran-with-golshifteh-farahani/5198286.article

Just landed a new job in my field, which is like a sub-niche of marketing, aligned with a company that does work in a very specific discipline that I have a degree in. It's a super cool field that I always wanted to work in, because I spend an inordinate amount of time just engaged in it off the clock, so I thought this would be the perfect fit.

I just came off a long period of unemployment so this was a god send after blowing through cash for such a long period of time.

Turns out, this job is a fucking dumpster fire in every sense of the word, mainly due to the company having recently been bought out by PE (which they didn't disclose during the interview) and fucking over all their customers and workers alike.

Not only that, but my boss is absolutely insane — like my 30/60/90 onboarding plan is less of a plan to learn the company and more of a full marketing transformation you'd pay an agency like 100k to complete in 90 days.

Now, my predicament lies in where to go next. Kinda done with marketing as a whole. Where I once worked on a team of kick-ass creatives and we were focused on making cool shit first, then monetizing/converting customers second, the maniacal focus on KPIs and pipeline is driving me insane. I always hated marketing but just ended up here through sheer inertia after school.

Part of me is thinking about just quitting for some crappy $17/hr job, just to distance myself from this insane boss I have. Then just go from there and possibly work at the airport or get into the airline industry, as I have a connection with a friend (not that it's glamorous but it's better than this shit).

Any gumshoes been in a similar predicament and came out on the other end unscathed? Just need some moral support for dealing with a maniac who wants me to work 24/7 with AI so he can get the bag.

It's unbelievably embarrassing. Where are the serious men and women in our society? How did we let power become so unappealing to decent intelligent serious people that the absolute most unappealing uninspired little goblins like this could just crawl in unopposed?

Drop out culture? Honest work culture? Or was it precisely through such utter profound disgust do they repel all decent people so thoroughly that nobody can stomach being in the same room as them unless they share the same venal soulless narcissism?