… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

Are you proposing the existence of monopolarbears?

Most of the Gen A and younger Gen Z I’ve randomly struck up conversations with in the last year or so have had their brains thoroughly rotted by TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Rumble, etc.

Avril Lavigne is actually a clone, or Biden is, or Kanye is,

Astrology is completely real and my magic crystals will heal your chakras,

Atlantis was totally real and actually we are all partially descended from different alien species and that’s what ethnicity and race actually are,

‘Insert movie here’ was basically actually real and making it into a movie is the way the powers that be laugh at us,

Shadow Work isn’t just a very loose and differently defined psychological practice of attempting to understand yourself better and come to grips with trauma and negative urges its left you with, its actually that you literally have a shadow demon/spirit possessing you, and if you don’t exorcise it ‘properly’, it will magically spread to other people.

… and I can tell this because I am a naturally born empath who is 100% accurate at determining what other people are thinking and feeling even if they directly tell me otherwise, which actually means that they are narcissists…

and so on and so on.

Of course this is my anecdotal experience, but this is what is normal for me to encounter… as I and the people around me are quite poor.

This image implies they could also be mutually attracted to rub their butts together.

I have literally met high schoolers who sincerely believed the Marvel movies were based on real life events, until I explained to them that no, they’re based on comic books, they are entirely fictional stories.

We already live in the dumbest possible timeline.

Remember how when Idiocracy came out, the general reception was ‘wow this is over the top, dude-bro moron version of the future, not worth serious discussion’, … and now a good chunk of people are looking back at it as ‘well actually, a lot of this seems scarily reasonable?’

The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization.

The human being created civilization not because of a willingness but because of a need to be assimilated into higher orders of structure and meaning.

The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

God was a dream of good government.

You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.

… prophetic words, one might say.

Anyway… in the sense you are speaking of, the only way to totally kill God would be the erasure of massive amounts of human history, combined with either killing or ‘reducating’ billions of people, and then the institution of some kind of Orwellian totalitarianism, which must basically persist in perpetuity.

Other than something like that… its not possible to totally exorcize the idea of God or Gods from humans… we are pattern seekers, we love simple explanations, and we love stories, narratives.

‘Under’ would have worked and been shorter.

I have despised twitter since basically its inception.

1. The character (original) character limit fundamentally means you are strongly encouraged to limit conversation to basically soundbites, slogans, and pithy comments. Even though this was changed later, it still created a culture that generally mocks anything long winded.

While its true that brevity is the soul of wit, wit is not the same thing as a detailed and nuanced discussion of a complex topic.

It thus lends itself to being an optimal tool for political slogans, celebrity gossip, and direct corporate advertisement.

2. Twitter is far, far, faaar too open ended, as in one to many kind of network connections. Its a dream come true also for narcissistic, attention seeking individuals who want to win Twitter.

3. Twitter blew up before Facebook completely shifted (enshittified?) their entire model from being focused on actually connecting friend groups, and directly pushed Facebook toward just being an unmitigated firehose of ‘content’ from every which way, which just became the norm for ‘social media’ design.

Of course X now is even fucking worse, but I am so glad its dying.

The way I see it, Twitter contributed heavily toward destroying the older, more personal formats of social media, it helped destroy the old forum culture of the net where people had communities and a measure of intellect, privacy and respect.

It took the sincerity out of online discourse, and was foundational in shifting the internet from a ‘place’ with lots of weird locales, into some kind of Eldritch god’s sick joke of a species level omni-mirror, reducing online humanity to a popularity contest of political slogans, narcissistic clout chasers, gossip mongers, and corporate sloganeering and brand worship… and giving all of this to us in an undifferentiated constant flow.

Potentially fashionable solution:

Get your own glasses, get some sufficiently powerdul IR emitting LEDs, attach them to the frame, wire them to a battery.

Result: Most cameras will see your face as a blinding white spot.

Apparently ‘Reflectables’ claims to achieve a similar result passively, with reflective frames and lenses.

For clarity: Vance did not literally say lugenpresse or fake news, he just performatively complained about fact checking.

I am the one saying lugenpresse.

…Because one of the many fascist elements of Trump’s cult is his repeated refrain of ‘fake news’, which is exactly the same tactic as Hitler and many other fascists have used in their rise to power.

Again, Vance did not literally say lugenpresse at the debate.

It’s actually worse.

The core MAGA people are utterly convinced that ‘fact checking’ is literally the moderators lying to prevent Republicans from saying what is actually true.

They are way, way, waaaaay down the rabbit hole of the lugenpresse, I mean fake news, that basically any time the figures they adore/worship are ever fact checked, well actually that is evidence of a vast liberal media conspiracy against them.

They actively despise fact checking, and when it happens, this triggers their conspiracism harder.

The reason why Vance made a show of crying about fact checking was partly due to personal anger/embarrassment/whatever, but the other part is that he knows that complaining about it is appealing to core Trump voters.

Though there are in some cases specific reasons to use certain brands, its usually just due to marketing, branding, and near total ignorance.

Its not anonymous. Its pseudonymous.

Even if your pseudonym isn’t directly linked to you, even if you are not doxxed, your pseudonym carries its own reputation.

Its up to the pseudonym operator to determine how to manage that.

When the levee breaks, I’ll have no place to stay

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_point

Basically, its a mathematical function where if you start at 0,0, you might falsely believe you are at the (or a) maximum or minimum of the function, as the slope at 0,0 is 0.

But, if you go any direction in the x axis, your function value rises, any direction in the y axis, your function value falls.

Thus a saddle point is an illusory, false impression of being at the extreme extent of a function, when in fact you are not.

The idea is that there is more to determining if you’re truly at a global max or min of a function than only finding a single point where the slope is 0.

Wait till this guy sees a frontal MRI of a human head.

To prevent a crash in the commercial office real estate market.

… Its a Korean beauty contest. The country with the highest rates of cosmetic plastic surgery in the world.

I… I get what you’re driving at, that people in general shouldn’t be so driven toward perfection in outward appearance.

But its a beauty contest, in a society where over 25% of women under 40 have had some kind of plastic surgery. and a huge cultural emphasis on perfection of physical appearance, where using AI enhanced filters is also hugely prevalent.

I’m not saying this is good, I personally don’t like beauty contests, I don’t like widespread unrealistic beauty standards… but I don’t see how this question, absent its fumbled lingo adding overt sexual connotations, is surprising at all.

…

It’s like being a vegan who is confused and angered by someone asking contestants at a hot dog eating contest how they prep before the contest:

Why isn’t the issue of meat eating being addressed at this meat eating contest?

…

Context should answer your question of ‘why do people at a beauty contest get asked how they would improve their beauty?’

It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.

Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.

Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.