Imagining a media that isn’t stenographers for incompetent lying fascists

SERIAL NUMBER: H-0 #battywanderer

Bots are like Darkspawn. You can count on the Grey Wardens to face this dastardly foe!

"Fuck off I got mine", in all its very many forms, is such an insidious yet common mindset

ANNO №196 100🎯 100🎯 100🎯 96🎯 99🎯 Total: 495/500 anno-game.netlify.app

The way that absolutely everything is politics now is just annoying. No one up until this year would have ascribed Falkland connotations to an England-Argentina match.

Nancy By Ernie Bushmiller July 15,1950

Like it takes 2 to Tango. We always fear the Excesses of the Revolution, we always fear The Terror, and we should, but The Terror would never happen if the Ancien régime had been reasonable. The tradgey of every revolution is that there were alternatives, but the Powers That Be refused to take them.

One of the things I really like about @mikeduncan.bsky.social's REVOLUTIONS is that he spends a *lot* of time on the prelude to these things so you understand *why* they happened, let me tell you there is no better revolutionary apologetics than describing the lead up a revolution.

"Everyone is a Consumer Now" is almost certainly the biggest cultural victory of Neoliberalism and the thing that most pop criticisms of neoliberalism don't seem to get

I think @sharonk.bsky.social has been posting about the lack of solidarity among the working class or how Everyone Is A Consumer Now as part of the big challenge of socdem parties, and this is possibly related.

That thing where people are like "but red states vote against their own interests!"? This is the same thing but in miniature. "*I* deserve my welfare b/c I'm a hard worker on tough times. But everyone else is a fraudster who's stealing from the system."

“I want to live like a local” tourists when they have to work long hours for low wages and then go home and eat potato chips instead sitting around at cafes all day long

Ancient Wings

a Pokémon a day keeps artblock away #561 Sigilyph

Skimmed the Wikipedia article on Catherine Howard and wtf Henry? Not only did you marry a girl young enough to be your daughter, but you go and lop off her head before she could even turn 20!

the greatest pleasure of being an evil scientist is hurling insults from your hilltop laboratory. just yelling alliterative nonsense out the window. i'll insult everyone. i'll insult your dad

Huh, two YouTubers I follow came out with videos both covering the same thing at the same time, and both use that as their thumbnail.

Maréchal Vauban (1633-1707):

My investor told me he doesn't really see the moat in my plan. I explained that's the point. The glacis protects the base of the wall and obscures the ditch entirely. By the time the assault party reaches the counterscarp with fascines, they will be committed and under crossfire from grapeshot

Christian Nationalism looks like seeing Jesus being executed by Romans in broad daylight and saying, “he should have just obeyed the law.”

there's not really any empirical way to test it but I do think that 'every political elite and a substantial portion of the population have subclinical PTSD of one kind or another from COVID' is the skeleton key that explains a lot, yeah

I don’t think anyone’s confused about the reference to the Magna Carta, the point is that there was no internal culture to develop and protect from outsiders at the time of the Magna Carta by those that created it because they were explicitly ruled by outsiders.

Heh. Someone on the tfwiki has experienced TV Nihon's dodgy subs.

it definitely speaks to either the inability or unwillingness of government to regulate, at best not after it's too late

Thinking of the fact that the TVTropes page for "Who Shot JFK?" starts with the four words "Americans love a conspiracy" and I can't help but think how true that statement is

part of the reason i am skeptical/pessimistic about the near future is the fact that a lot of the centrist establishment primarily wants to tailgate popular opinion off a cliff, and given as the right continues to radicalize and bring the voter base with, the centre will go along with them

One evidence of supply and demand is that in the olden days, when art patrons were mostly rich folks with egos to flatter, artists would specialize in flattering portraits, and nowadays with art patronized through the internet the big time artists are the ones who draw horny stuff.

I need the olds to please decide: do you want to complain about kids being inside on their phones, or do you want to complain about the kids outside? You must pick one.

working on this in 2019, the reason we delayed releasing any LLMs to the public was specifically because "if we fuck this up or handle it irresponsibly, we will ruin first the web, then society, and then they will stop letting us do this," to which i guess the counterargument is "no it won't"

It's funny when you read a fic that's clearly written before a work comes in that either contradicts what the fic states or that clearly goes in another direction than what the fic writer intended (e.g. fancasts)

Honestily though i think this is part of the problem. I think for many people they are experincing what people 100 years ago thought about physics. That we had reached the cap of it and that if we do too much there wont be questions left to answer. Not realizing the reformulations we may expect

i have great sympathy with folks “arguing to benefit”, trying in vain to convince people to Be Happy and Grateful for the Marvels of our Age. But you are arguing against one of the most fickle and wayward forces on earth— human appetite. We will need deeper and bigger ideas than “It’s Better”.

Tech change qua change isn’t sufficient as an ultimate purpose, and even “making everyone live longer” doesn’t seem to be a sturdy enough ultimate purpose for most, nor is “it’s correct!” Meaning has questing + speculation + wonder encoded in it, as well as individual narrative w/in bigger stories.

the execution mostly doesn't click with me personally, (I clearly post on the chaotic town square type places more), but I do think at an architecture level reditt has the best 'idea' here. there are explicit opted-in communities with explicit norms. r/beagles & r/beaglescircljerk are different.

the truth is, social media is not too split into 'echo chambers' but is in fact not silo'd *enough*. humans naturally code-switch in different venues and settings but the idea of the 'common town square' means that we have these places that are both dive bar and work happy hour and it's a huge mess.

Funny #BG3 bit: I forgot that Volo gives you a book that gives you an advantage while fighting Orin, and I didn't need it anyway

Increasingly think we need a ‘modernity is actually good’ political tendency. the right is putatively pro-industry and economic growth but thinks science is gay and wants to throw out vaccines for essential oils, the left putatively believes science but also embraces crank degrowth NIMBYism

I am not very religious, but the idea of each person as "endowed with infinite worth" moves me to tears. So many people are being knocked out under this regime whom we can never get back.

Generating AI images to protest datacenters...

"As a realist, I am shocked to hear the middle powers are rearming and discussing power balancing when China, Russia, and the United States all have openly have imperial ambitions."

Belgium has had more goals scored against Spain than anyone else they've faced in the #WorldCup this year combined, and they only scored one.

Kylian Mbappé: "At the end of the day, you know... you take all the glory when you win. When you don't win you have to... sorry, to take the sh*t"

It's why we have the term "guerrilla" in our vocabulary, I think?

Wait am I reading this right? Spain is in the WC final and has yet to allow a goal throughout this year? #worldcup

News organizations should periodically stop and look in the mirror and ask themselves “Have we internalized copspeak to the point that our headlines indistinguishable from police department email subject lines?”

How it feels advocating for Fiber supremacy in the Protein era

I present Eleanor Trevelyan, a mage who believes in the freedom of mages, and that she is the Herald of Andraste. We pretend her eyebrows are the same colour as her hair (I have beef with the inquisition character creator's lighting) #dragonage #dragonageoc #eleanortrevelyan

Someone on the Colossal Order dev team is a fan. #umamusume #citiesskylines