I imagine that Twitter being blocked in Europe might actually lead to some of those sources moving elsewhere to continue to reach their audience. I’m not a big fan of blocking websites either in a general sense, but a I can see why countries would want to avoid having what’s happening to the US be repeated within their own borders, and that seems to be a distinct danger with Twitter. There’s a pretty good argument to be made that that’s literally its purpose at this point.

Dismantling legitimate governments with disinformation seems like a pretty viable power grab strategy for billionaires trying to create a megacorp hellscape where they get to do whatever they want until the planet becomes uninhabitable for humans some time after their own deaths.

So, step 1, substantially reduce agricultural migrant labor; step 2, create gulags for the neurodivergent to try to make up the difference? Lovely.

Honestly? Why should states that actually can get it together to take active measures to try to take care of their constituents have to be limited by what the most ignorant and backward parts of the country decide on? How many times do we have to see some court in Texas shoot down a measure that would help people before we land on no longer caring what Texas thinks about anything?

I get that there are people in these states who don’t want this stuff and they can’t all easily relocate, but we don’t want it either and we actually manage to organize and vote in accordance with that. Why should every state in the US be held back by every state in the US that just went out and voted to tear apart all the collective good that we have?

Maybe we’d be better off separating power down to the state level or just straight up breaking up the US. Funneling money into red payee states so they can have things like roads and health care clearly isn’t helping to drag them any further to the left, but maybe if they didn’t actually have access to those funds it might incentivize policies that don’t just hand everything to the worst people they can find. Or at the very least, maybe they couldn’t afford to fuck things up so badly.

They voted for this. We didn’t.

A few weeks back I got a parking ticket because I believed a google search result. Parking is free on Sundays and holidays, but the city’s website doesn’t specify which holidays. Google insisted that Halloween is a holiday and thus parking is free, but it isn’t actually federally recognized, which I found out the hard way.

I was watching a talk debate on consciousness yesterday where they briefly touched on this topic. One of the speakers was contending that attempting to create AI that is even convincing to humans is a terrible idea ethically.

On the one hand, if we do eventually accidentally create something with awareness, we have no idea what degree of suffering we’d be causing it; we could end up regularly creating and snuffing out terrified sentient beings just to monitor our toasters or perform web searches. On the other hand, though, and this was the concern he seemed to find more realistic, we may end up training ourselves to be less empathetic by learning to ignore the potential suffering of convincingly feeling ‘beings’ that aren’t actually aware of anything at all.

That second bit seems rather likely. We already personify completely inanimate objects all the time as a normal matter of course, without really trying to. What will happen to our empathy and consideration when we routinely interact with self-proclaimed sentient systems while callously using them to our own ends and then simply turning them off or erasing their memories?

Amazon Graveyard sounds like a subscription service for apps that have been discontinued. Not like, a service that lets you keep using them, but you just get to have defunct apps that don’t work and pay Amazon for the pleasure.

Only $14.99 per month! One IP per subscription!

I mean, it looks more like a Jeep or a Bronco if you ask me.

Yeah, maybe. I hope so. I feel like they could just have rat races, throw it on youtube, and make a bit of money for more funding if they really wanted to. I’d watch.

Interesting article! A bit weird that they felt the need to plug the ugliest vehicle ever created, but the findings are certainly interesting! It’s hard not to read enthusiasm into that little rat scooting along in its rat car!

It’s disheartening to think that at the end of the experiment they’ll just kill the poor thing, though. Like, I get not wanting to use the same rats from study to study so that you have a proper control, but there has to be a less heartless way of doing that.

Don’t drag the rest of us into her shit. Being trans has nothing to do with why she’s a shitty person. We’re not here to beg for your approval before we get to be who we are, and we don’t need it. Pick another hill.

Well if a professional condescending hate-monger says it, it must be true!

Oh fuck off, Sam.

Good to hear! Thanks!

Good riddance. I hope they succeed.

Does this extend to not discussing plans, posting information about which states may be taking measures to protect their citizens or how effective those measures might be, or discussing things like resistance or mutual aid? Those seem like pretty important topics to be able to discuss.

I literally changed my discord profile to a Tank Girl theme hours before Trump was elected when I was still pretty sure it’d be Harris. Yeesh.

Imagine straddling the Gen X/Millennial line. We doubly don’t exist.

What did we get out of it, though? Kind of a lot, actually.

We legalized marijuana in a lot of places, got marriage equality in a lot of places, and did actually push some positive changes in general. How long they’ll last? How many survive even now? Eh… Well, that depends on how well we manage to get out from under the shadow of the boomers and bring our ideals to the next generations.

I’ve been watching a lot of old 80s and 90s movies recently, and I noticed something starkly different from most of the movies I’ve seen coming out in the past decade or so, particularly the glut of superhero movies we had for a while there. With very few exceptions, all the protagonists were anti-establishment.

Star Wars, Ghostbusters, the Mario Movie, the Breakfast Club, the Princess Bride, it goes on and on and on. The heroes were all rebelling against some ignorant authority that either didn’t understand the damage it was able to do or didn’t care about hurting those who had no power. As a result, when I was coming up my generation felt very much against the established status quo. Even the kid-targeted stuff in the early 90s, it was all gross-out humor and struggling against adult authority in favor of personal autonomy. Nickelodeon takes over your school. As a teenager it was grunge and punk and everything being ‘extreme’.

The impression I get from a lot of the late 00s and 2010s fictional media, though, and much of what I’ve seen in the 20s so far, has been stories that are on-side with some big establishment. Even Peter Parker was turned into a suck-up for some billionaire. There are still instances of anti-authoritarianism, but it doesn’t seem to be the prevailing narrative the way it was. Instead it largely seems to be about going along with society and not bucking the system.

Maybe what we need, if we want to change things, is to instill that pushing against the establishment in the next generation again. That 70s and 80s era Muppets vibe. Turtles that live in the sewers because if they lived on the surface, the powers that be wouldn’t understand them. Otters living in poverty and being exploited by hoity-toity customers who decide not to pay them for their laundry services on Christmas in the first five minutes of the movie.

Did Chris Pratt Mario get into a chase with Koopa cops while fighting a corrupt authoritarian government? No he did not. He was on the side of a social order that was being disrupted by an evil musician.

Artists need to change the narrative and be intentional about it.

I’m looking at moving to the Netherlands! I have somewhere to stay, I’ve been starting to learn Dutch, and I’m in the process of getting all my plans sorted out! I do have some friends in Germany that I want to come visit at some point once I’m settled in, though, so maybe we could meet up at some point! It definitely would be good to sort of build some community in Europe!

I spent this morning getting the paperwork ready to get my passport and learning what I need to do to get out. I’m going to need to figure out some financial stuff and either sell or ship my vehicle, but the more I look the more appealing it seems. This has been a wakeup call for me. Things in the US are really screwed up, even before a second Trump term, and I absolutely can go live a better life somewhere else.