I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it’s painfully early 2000s. It’s from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.

One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn’t have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.

Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn’t do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn’t time or budget for.

Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.

I’m not a huge traveler, but I’ve been to the UK and parts of Europe. The Czech Republic was my favorite place, of the places I’ve been. Ironically never been to Canada, despite having some extended family there. I would love to go, and I love being in foreign places, but I hate getting there. Travel is awful, especially now.

I’ve lived in both urban and rural areas, and the fear is constant everywhere among people who have never traveled. Urban people are afraid that everyone in the country is a Deliverance KKK member, and rural people think the cities are a gang-infested war zone. What’s wild is that, unlike visiting other countries, they could just hop in the car and visit the city or countryside for a weekend. They are consuming lazy media tropes and taking them as fact.

Traveling, even just regional travel, would benefit a lot of people in the USA. We have way more in common with each other than with the oligarchs.

2004 would be a bit late but it kind of reminds me of MPlayer.com. Here’s a video. The interface kind of looked like a radio, it also featured the first voice-chat I ever used, but everyone was on modem so it was unusably terrible.

There’s actually enough channels like this that I think it qualifies as a genre. They kind of give me “tradwife” vibes so I don’t really watch them, but it seems like quite a few are in France for some reason (maybe some government program where you can get these properties cheaply).

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

Given the opacity, unaccountability and character of ICE it’s almost certain that ICE agents are taking bribes, running drugs and guns, doing shakedowns, pimping, and engaging in all kinds of organized crime shit. If you’re a cartel, who better to pay than the masked mercenary who’s above the law and doesn’t give a shit about anything but power and money? Easiest partnership ever. Hell, they’re probably bribing from the top down and getting entire local chapters on the payroll.

I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

At first I thought she meant ‘fantastic’ in its literal sense and I was optimistic. No, of course the former CFO of Morgan Stanley is a ghoul.

“Burgum, a Republican, used his speech to criticize Silicon Valley for having supported ‘the climate extremist agenda,’ which he defined as the idea that ‘a degree of temperature change in the year 2100 is the thing that we should drive every policy in America.’ Burgum added: ‘I’ve always been a little offended by that.’”

Well it’s like 3 or 4 degrees at this point, which is civilization-ending. Real, “we’re all going to die anyway” energy here. Glad we’re doing this to hallucinate the next Amazon show and not slow down the approaching catastophe or at least give poor people food or some shit. Is that a little offensive?

The Threads logo looks like a parasitic whipworm.

Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn’t turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.