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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I sincerely doubt they give a shit about it.

    I mean, they definitely won’t give a shit if you don’t vote. If anything it simplifies their math. If you don’t show up if you’re mad or sad you sure as hell won’t show up if you’re glad. So you can be safely ignored.

    Biden already gives a shit about ~20% uncommitted in Minnesota, ~10% uncommitted in Michigan in the last primaries. nope, uncommitted didn’t win but they’re freaking out high ranking Democrats. There are more uncommitted than the percentage he won by in some of these states. They didn’t win but now a LOT more politicians are struggling to dismiss Palestine. Hell Pelosi was out and out accusing protestors of being shills for China and Russia last week.

    Democrats are currently avoiding college campuses for appearances because they realize how unpopular this war in Gaza is.

    showing that there is a voting population that is unhappy carries weight, and it sticks around for years to come. It’s a record just like the census.


  • I respect that, but you can still make that known at the polls with write-in, with third party, or just scrawling “fuck all y’all” over the ballot.

    Even if it doesn’t lead to someone winning, every one of the above does get recorded. Every year mickey mouse gets a fraction of the vote, and lets be real, if Mickey ever got 5% of the vote, every candidate would be announcing their runs at Disney World with the hope they could attract just half that group.

    If you do nothing at the polls, everyone will assume you don’t care and don’t care back.

    If you do something at the polls, that doesn’t help either party, then the two other parties might actually be incentivized to get your vote doing things you DO care about. You at least show up, so you are someone they should care about.

    If for no other reason, it’s a record of someone flipping the bird to everyone in power, a small act of defiance that can’t make it back to you because voting is anonymous. If you’re really that powerless the process should only take 5 minutes because the lines to the polls will be short.

    vote vote vote. even if it’s “none of the above”


  • Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.

    However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

    … Are you suggesting that we increase inequality to make the world better? Like we need an overlord, be it robot or human, and the rest of the population needs to be placated, worked to the bone, and easily replaced?

    I gotta assume I am just vastly misunderstanding something in this argument, but I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is. Is it just sarcastic?


  • I mean, the sad part is that there’s really no other place guys and gals mix besides work or school. Once you graduate it’s just work that remains. I don’t even mean romantically either. I think it’s hand in hand with the loneliness epidemic everyone keeps talking about. Where do you meet new people? Women can be so rare in some men’s lives that to just say “ask if they like you” almost implies that they should ask every woman which both sides know is not what should be happening.

    Ideally you would be mixing with strangers at a pub or something where if you put your foot in your mouth and somebody says no to friendship/partnership you both go your separate ways and no harm no foul, you probably won’t even run into each other for days/weeks, but now everything is just shitty.

    • Clubs are too loud to talk at, so while you might be adjacent to a bunch of new people you won’t be with any new people.

    • Bars work somewhat decent, people are friendly, the counter is where strangers mix. It does require you to imbibe a steady stream of booze though. You’ll also have to jump around until you find one that you like. Same thing with smoking areas, smokers are crazy friendly, asking for a light is a great ice breaker. I actually used to carry a lighter just for this reason, and I never even smoked. Still a terrible habit to adopt to get friends though.

    • Any speed-friending or dating events/sites are just crawling with cringey people (I once went to one and had someone try to sell me a timeshare)

    • Everything has gone up in price, which sucks because now you go to an event and have a pressure to make it worth the money which just adds to the shittiness of the night.

    • The most reliable place people hang with strangers is the internet, but even then it’s not a conversation. It’s letters and pen pals.

    Way too many people just have work left to meet people and that’s not exactly a great place to pursue a relationship because careers cause way to many tripwires. A foot in the mouth brings in HR. Someone gets promoted and now there’s a power dynamic. Yes it’s inherently riskier to pursue people there. I think guys complain about it more just because they’re more isolated and deal with it more.

    I spent a lot of time when I graduated trying to find somewhere where I could find people and I finally landed on the convention scene and even met my wife there, but it took almost 5 years of leaving my house, trial and error, lots of events, and some truly boring expensive nights.



  • I mean, I understand leaving out Brick. Both Roland and Brick are not… bastions of dialogue. Both combined could be a bit much in a film. Even though he’s a fascinating character. Mordecai confuses me more. He seems like a much better straight man (comedy term, not the orientation) than Roland or Brick, and if he operates like a sniper then he makes a great diagetic narrator to move dialogue and scenes because he operates as the scout from range. Granted the CG for the bird will probably cost.

    I’m sure a good chunk was they wanted more Tiny Tina, and then they added Kreig just for the reveal moment which is… a lot of dedicated screen time just to create a moment. Seeing as he barely had any time in the trailer… clearly he doesn’t shine in this film.


  • Oh it’s easy, they just googled “Roland voice lines” and he sounds like a perfect role for Kevin heart.

    Could he pull off the borderlands 2 Roland intro? I don’t think so, but I’ve been surprised before.

    What really has me saddened is the whole pisswater gully bit. Tiny Tina is a native of pandora, Roland and Lilith are not (to my knowledge). So if anything, the roles should have been entirely reversed because:

    1. It makes more sense.

    2. It’s way funnier.

    Which means they’re messing with backstory of the characters to match… nothing. Because it doesn’t seem to make the writing better, and it differs from the original. It would also match Tiny Tina’s character so much better and mitigate the annoying whiny child part of the character that is just SHINING through this trailer.








  • It’s because a person can crank out a deep fake in 3 hours, and a crappy one in one. It never cropped up because… well lets be real it was a couple of weirdos that were doing it, unless it bubbles up from the dark corners of the internet you risk the Streisand effect by bringing attention to it.

    AI can crank out 40 in a minute. 7200 in three hours. That’s an entirely different beast. The sheer mass and volume ramps up the odds of any image bubbling up from the dark corners of the web falling into the limelight and now this problem that wasn’t big enough to merit thought is rearing up it’s ugly head right in front of us.

    You can generate unique pictures of Taylor Swift faster than even Taylor swift can generate pictures of Taylor Swift. Within one hour of Taylor swift being seen with a man (and you have enough images of the man) you can create a dozen images of her on a date with that man and attempt to sell them to paparazzi.

    The problem is volume. Just like how email made everyone connected and allowed the Nigerian Prince scandal to occur.


  • Yeah, there is a large fixation on whether he did or did not pull the trigger and I genuinely feel like that’s not the straw that breaks the camel’s back, because ultimately he was told it was a clear gun.

    What matters is:

    • Did he know that there were serious concerns about gun safety on set?

    • Did he use his star power/producer role to silence those concerns?

    • Did he retaliate against people who raised those concerns?

    If he did any of those three things, then you have a rapidly strengthening case that he knowingly endangered the crew, and he should have known NOT to have aimed that gun at anybody. You made that gun unsafe and then the gun went off in your hands because you reaped what you sowed.


  • look, I can understand the argument that you must vote for the most effective way to contain an evil. It’s a good solid argument.

    However it starts taking damage almost immediately when:

    • The plan to fight the evil is using the most disliked president in recent history to win a popularity contest.

    • They pre-emptively destroy any and all opportunities to find a better candidate to win the popularity contest against the evil.

    • They refuse to debate anybody just like the evil they want to defeat. Making it impossible to verify they’re the one for the job.

    • They forcibly re-schedule the primary schedule to delay any signs that this plan might be a terrible idea.

    • Their age is seriously in question, their mental acuity is in question, and they also decide to dodge being in a completely unscripted environment for two hours while standing.

    Certainly with all this you can at least understand why someone would rather vote third party, because this Biden option is not making me feel any safer.

    At what point can we stop pointing the finger at the voters and start pointing at the guy they’re “supposed to vote for”? Is there a point we can ever point that finger at Biden? Or is it like Trump,where we need to vote for him “even if he were to shoot someone in the street”?


  • Secondly (more controversially), is a picture of a noose racist? I mean, it certainly has racist connotations and I personally wouldn’t have used it, but (bear with me) I’m not sure racist is the concrete conclusion. Lots of people have been hung throughout history, if you’re not viewing it through a racial lens then are you a racist or just very insensitive.

    I see what you’re saying… but it seems like a technicality that’s not worth exploring here.

    If instead it was a guillotine with a caption of “this year’s detention activity”… it’s really not any better. Like it’s no longer racist but… now it’s just purely about killing kids in a more equitable homicidal format. It’s very dark humor in a very public place.

    It’s a lot of time and effort and argument to debate “yeah this was terrible but it might not have been racist”. Does a definitive answer of “at least it wasn’t racist” make this appreciably any better? Does it make them any more likely to get a teaching job after this?

    It also doesn’t change the core argument the teacher is making in the story. “You lumped me in with a bunch of racists because I was white. I took down the image because it was offensive. Obviously. Why would I leave it up if it was offensive?”