The Nixon NTR arc is tragic though.

Dr Mercola is a fun one.

The Food Babe as well.

They both should have associated accounts across multiple social media sites.

In practice, online education is worse. Discussion boards are a shallow replacement for real shoulder to shoulder conversations, many students speed through video lectures, and the entire experience seems flattened and gamified. It feels more “effective and efficient” but that feeling doesn’t necessarily match reality.

The pictures look like screen grabs of a zoom call, not really profile pics.

Most romance scammers steal random photos from online. “Nicole” could be a yahoo boy in Lagos, or multiple guys working for a quasi-state approved Russian operation.

can we not compare the media’s complicity in the dehumanization of a group of people currently being targeted by fascist regimes to articles about whether a certain technology is useful or not

The Internet Archive - long term storage of as many books/films/music/journals/games as possible.

I wonder how it affected the TERFs on tumblr…

Remember that smile gave Moscow Mitch gave when they confirmed Trump’s lame duck Supreme Court nominee, despite rejecting Obama’s?

I’ve had friendships end over basically that statement.

The series is pleasant to read. It’s no different than reading a Tom Clancy or John Grisham or Colleen Hoover novel, just targeted at a younger audience. The fandom culture around it was fun - especially for those of us who essentially “grew up” with Harry by being roughly the same age as him at each release.

Not every novel needs to be Pale Fire or JR.

I rank them 3>2>4>1>5>7(w/out epilogue)>6>7

I think the ending of the first book was planned, just clumsily executed. It’s a mystery novel - she places all of these red herrings/misdirection. The reveal that Snape was actually saying a counter course with the flying bludger incident is “cute” and goes with the muddled messages and themes she has around that character.

She knew where she wanted to get to, it’s just one of the more “Idiot Ball” driven plots of the series (along with the fifth book). Harry does stupid impulsive shit because that’s his character, and the world just has to react to it. Harry logic isn’t normal people logic, so by the end of the story we’ve kinda lost track of the plot.

It’s no Earthsea but it’s serviceable paperback detective fiction for children.

I’m stoned so:

The technocrats (Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc) are SEELE. Musk is Gendo - ie, at the table but rogue (and I don’t want to imagine what he’d do with a planet full of Yue/Rei’s) Thiel doesn’t trust Musk, so Vance is like his Kaji. (Misato is like literally a Freud caricature of a woman, so we can make her a couch to fit the whole sexual ethos)

COVID was the second impact. The angels are attendant disasters that go with it and things like climate change etc.

Luigi is Kaworu, a gorgeous bisexual twink who is being crushed by the system.

The American people are Shinji, paralyzed under stress and trauma. Asuka is a bunch of other countries, being very angry at Americans for not doing shit while not really coping with their own problems.

Rei is obviously the internet/technology.

The globalists have been priming us for this information the entire time! Pre programming! Please buy my protein power.

Stories don’t have to have “hard” magic systems to be good. I’m a big fan of the magical realism popular in Latin American fiction - where the magic is ambiguous and never quite explained at all.

The problem is the way that Rowling uses magic.

Rowling was clearly writing mystery novels, while lifting a lot of ideas for her setting from like The Worst Witch series. She uses magic spells like a Checkhov’s gun kind of thing, usually establishing whatever magical principle will save the day earlier in the novel. With a relatively self contained story, it works really well. Prisoner of Azkaban is one of her stronger books - the way that she sets up the mystery with the time turner as well as the stuff with Sirius Black, etc - because it’s very “clean” in this way. She introduces a bunch of new elements to her world, but they are all tied around supporting her story. This is good writing.

The problem is that Harry Potter books don’t work as an overarching story. It is abundantly clear that the Horcruxes and Deathly Hallows were not planned from the beginning. Rowling got to the last two books, realized that she needed to write some kind of ending, and then completely drove her plot off the rails.

You could say because she didn’t have an established magic system, it made it easier to drive off the rails, but really, it’s more that she’s competent at writing stand alone mystery novels (which really, that’s what books 1-4 are and they’re the best in the series for it) and not larger narratives. She doesn’t know how to convey the scope of a war, she doesn’t know how to tie together an Epic fantasy.

To borrow Alex Jones’ term - it is information warfare. Train people to accept the outputs of LLMs, attack media literacy (in conjunction with the fact that public schools in the US spent ten years not teaching children how to read), and hide actual sources.

You can have your LLM trained to weasel around the fact that the chattel slavery of black Americans was the primary cause of the Civil War, or falsely represent science surrounding gender and sexuality (they’re explicitly tuning Grok on this).

You don’t have to worry about subversive messages on war or women in your “AI” generated “Ghibhli” film. Have all the fun space faring of Star Wars, without the prequel geopolitics everyone hated until they saw it happen.

Technofascists really benefit from certain kinds of information being inaccessible…

I love gen 1 sprite work.

Transmetropolitan had in-dream advertising. I think you got it from breathing in some sort of gas when walking around in public.

The most unrealistic thing about the Transmetropolitan series was the fact that Spider was able to make a living as a journalist.

I think it might be an “older people in the south” thing. (Like all boomers and older I’ve talked to about it know about it, usually not younger) I worked at a diner for a bit, and it would be Silent Generation types that would order it.

It’s pretty good, but real cheddar would be better. It’s that similar salty/sweet combo that makes French fries and a McFlurry better than sex.

Buying a Cybertruck: a choice

Being Jewish, a woman, transgender, disabled, etc, etc: not a choice

IMHO, it has three purposes:

1. a grilled cheese on cheap white bread with enough butter to guarantee an acid reflux episode
2. melted on Chef Boyardee ravioli
3. on a slice of apple pie

If your Kraft singles are too precious, I think the Dollar Tree brands stray even further from gods light.

In a video taken from a Cybertruck of a man throwing American cheese slices at the windshield of a Cybertruck, many comments suggest filing a police report and attempting to dox the man by posting a screengrab of his face to social media: “Freeze frame and blow up his face. Go on all the social media platforms and post your video. I would file a police report stating that if he is willing to do this in public, then he obviously has some type of vendetta against me, and therefore, I feel threatened and fearful for my life… the only way these people will learn [is] if they are shamed,” one comment reads. “Can you make an 8 x 11 print out of his face with a QR code that leads to the video so everybody in your city will know who this guy is and what he did?? can’t we just make him famous?”

I like this “throwing slices of American cheese” at Cybertrucks. It’s barely even food, so it’s not really that wasteful. I’m sure the synthetic oilly shit has a wonderful reaction with that unprotected stainless steel. It’s also fucking hilarious - “hey police, someone threw cheese at my car, I’m in fear for my life.”