I find the movies conceptually interesting because there aren’t many movies in which humans are just explicitly the bad guys, or in terms of the most recent one just a supporting entity that exists on the periphery of the story. Avatar kinda does that, too, but the Avatar movies are also puddle deep genre fiction and the “of the Apes” movies are at least structurally and narratively competent.
However, getting an MBA isn’t going to change you from one type of person to the other.
Sure, an MBA is sort of useless. Management is largely based around personality. And you can’t really teach personality. It’s the same way for a lot of professions, like teaching, actually. In fact, I’d say the management pool should be drawn from people who were accomplished high school teachers. There’s a lot of crossover there in terms of organization, planning, and dealing with a bunch of people who all hate the work you make them do.
Dog, we’re all engineers. And the worst business leaders I’ve ever worked with directly were good engineers before they got promoted into positions of management (or started their own terrible business, as the case might be) in which they had no business being because the skill requirements for engineering are not automatically transferable to managing people. It’s called the Peter Principle, and there’s some real truth to it.
I want to see engineers run companies that make things
I see you’ve never worked with engineers.
Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.
Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early, meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.
And it’s a great line for the gun lobby. In a lot of ways, the NRA and gun manufacturers would prefer a Biden victory because gun sales spike when Democratic presidents get elected, as gun-nuts are certain every time it happens that this is the time, for real, that they’re “coming for our guns.” In other words, people panic buy rifles because they think a federal ban is coming. But the reality is that Dems will never push through sweeping anti-gun legislation because there are so many pro-2FA democrats out there that doing so would be ludicrously difficult and monumentally unpopular.
This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn’t seen in a while and it’s wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don’t use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like…how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They’re so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.
And that, I think, is the core difference. It’s not that the phones took over, it’s that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.
And that’s the entirety of the modern internet. It’s why tiktok is so popular. It’s why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It’s why Twitter took off. It’s also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn’t that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website’s leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.
I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it’s different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you’re a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it’s building and building and it seems like it’ll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you’d appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it’s just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.
My favorite was the Chapo Traphouse subreddit because the image in this post describes the hosts and their relationship with their fans. Whenever the subreddit got banned and the hosts heard about it their response was “good, that was the right choice. We fully support the admins here and their banning of that subreddit.” The reddit fans were so salty.
Under the Dome has always been super interesting to me because Brian K. Vaughn is one of the best comic book writers of all time and a consistent criticism of UTD is how bad the writing is. I know he didn’t write many of the episodes, though, but I also wonder how his episodes rank in comparison with the others.
Anything related to a DND live play I’m going to assume will be immediately toxic by virtue of what I understand about DND’s fanbase. I love Dimension20 and I like Critical Role but I’m going to assume every other fan of the show is an insufferable idiot.
psychotic break a couple of years ago after his mom died
Went from “weird” to “sad and tragic” pretty quick. Honestly, it makes me worried about my own mental health in a big way should I face a similar kind of tragedy.
There’s a million different ways to describe someone like that. I like mine. You like yours.
For anyone wondering, Chaya Raichik is the reactionary ghoul who runs Libs of TikTok. I actually had no idea this was a semi-famous person until you actually made a comment about them.
I’m waiting for the day Jimmy Wales gets fed up and sells Wikipedia to Amazon and every page has an Amazon link to “great products matching your interests.” Can we have internet 2.0 now? One without companies and just all the weird people from the first internet who made shitty webcomics and shared waaaaaay too much about their personal lives.
This is a good example of an argument that fails by virtue of its foundational premises. Vaush’s foundational premise for age of consent is tied to socioeconomic or material factors around power. In other words, the argument is founded on the premise that a child has less power than an adult so children can’t consent to intimate relationships with adults. This ignores the much more intractable argument over psychological and emotional maturity and the significance of particular age-specific life milestones that help to shape a child into an adult - a fully self-accountable member of society. Socioeconomics have mitigating influence over those things, which implies that even under socialism or any kind of post-capitalist society, that a society would have good reason to maintain agent of consent laws. It also totalizes socioeconomic factors as the defining impetus for consent, but that is in and of itself a slippery slope because you could take it to a logical extreme and argue that people of color and white people shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships, because a person of color has less socioeconomic power in America than a white person, or even that men and women shouldn’t be allowed to be in relationships at all because men have greater socioeconomic power than women, which would mean that everyone should only be allowed to date same-sex members of their own race.
I miss the weird edginess of the internet. The reality is that the internet was a place that kids got warned about being full of weirdos and dangerous types. And they weren’t wrong. The thing is, that also made it interesting and full of fascinating content. And it was largely unregulated and uncensored because the people in power were too old to understand or care about it. Now with things like KOSA and the centralization of the internet around a few megaplatforms, there’s less variety and creativity. The internet has become an endless soup of banal, milquetoast content. Vaguely appealing to everyone, but not greatly appealing to anyone.
Part of me is glad that my continuing insistence that younger generations are dumber than I was at their age is not just me being an old man mad at kids for still having the youth that he squandered. A larger part of me is terrified at the prospect of a generation being continuously microdosed with levels of garbage entertainment and misinformation that would make George Orwell nauseous.
I had the attention span to sit down and play…maybe a quarter of GTA 5. If that. At this point, I don’t want to have to figure out what I was supposed to do or where to go. I want like…10 to 15 minutes of gameplay I can put down and then do something else and then come back and have another 15 minutes that’s equally self-contained. I just feel like GTA punishes you for trying to do that.
A snake can’t sprint at you at 25 miles an hour and then rip you in half like a phone book as soon as it sees you. Nor would it. A panicked gorilla placed in a strange location like a mall will potentially kill anything in sight.
Edging is not a new thing, really. You’ve probably just never encountered the concept. Edging is the practice of bringing yourself to the edge of orgasm before backing away. The idea is that when you do finally orgasm it’s been “built up to” by the earlier edging so you get a better climax.