Coca_Cola_but_Commie [he/him]

I love how Fortinbras is hyped up through the whole play as this existential threat to Denmark and then he shows up and he’s like “Yeah, so my uncle said I couldn’t fuck with you guys so I’m just passing through. He said I could get Poland, even though it’s not worth anything, so I did. What the fuck? Why is everybody dead? You all killed each other? Fuck, that’s so sad. Guess I’m king of Denmark now.”

It can’t possibly be that while once motorcycles and Harley Davidsons in particular were a novelty, then became a status symbol of masculinity ridden by modern day outlaws and cowboys, they are now primarily associated with gruesome preventable deaths and insecure old men.

Prawduce

I’m not saying they shouldn’t put her out to pasture and replace her with a 35 year-old who will never die but on the other hand she isn’t that old. She’ll turn 70 this year which is well into retirement age for us working class schlubs, but for a cushy gig like theirs that’s no deal. I know Ginsberg refused to retire but RBG was well into her eighties when Obama was still president and she had pancreatic cancer. Unless democrats believe they won’t control the presidency or the Senate at any time in the next decade this isn’t a big issue. I mean, unless I’m wrong a seventy-something woman dies during a Republican presidency, then it’s a huge issue for them.

Man, I just saw this AI advertised on Twitter as an AI to write a book. It’s called “Claude-Author.” You pay them $10, send in your prompt, and they send back an AI generated novel plus cover.

I genuinely don’t think AI will supplant people when it comes to making art. Maybe some artists will use AI and then edit the result, but at the end of the day AI output is boring. There’s a good Ursula Le Guin quote about lifeless derivative fantasy books that I think applies here, “Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises… What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life–of a sort, for a while.” I’d say AI is like the logical extreme of these commodifiers. And maybe some people will be excited by AI for a little while, but I really think in the end it’s output will be so dull that no one will want it.

The one arena I could see AI taking over entirely, if it hasn’t already, is the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) market. But even then, for those high-volume readers, I might be doing them a disservice in thinking they would go for AI slop.

Anyway, I doubt that “Claude-Author” is the best AI has to offer, but they had some sample novels on their page, and I just thought the technology was going to be more impressive than that. One, their “novel” probably wasn’t even 10,000 words. And it only had coherence in the loosest possible terms. Like, character traits, names, and the plot and their role in it, managed to be consistent. Barely. And that was probably because there were only four named characters in the whole thing. Even on my cruelest day, voicing my worst thoughts about the reading public, I would not believe that any human being would enjoy reading content generated by this program.

I got that Le Guin quote from this Reddit thread, it’s from a forward to Tales of Earthsea that came out in 2001.

building the medieval socialist utopia out of News from Nowhere because you fucked up your economy so bad you had to abandon industrial civilization

Really looking forward to visiting the UK in ten years or so.

This business with Israel letting AI drop bombs is straight out of a science fiction novel. We built computers that could hallucinate and then asked them who should live and who should die.

I mean, I’d rather see this than the usual version which features a young woman bound in place of Joe Biden.

I’m always astounded by those. What sort of guy would have one? Does he have any women whatsoever in his life? If he does, what do they think? Why doesn’t anyone ever, like, see that guy get out of his truck and just attack him? Such a man must be among the scum of the Earth, the absolute dregs of humanity.

Libs love to pretend that if you just vote blue enough that the valiant democrats will do another New Deal, or realize the Great Society, or build an American Nordic model, or do anything good.

Even from a left lib position, even if you for some reason believe that Biden actually cares about LGBT people, or trade unions, or making a robust and safe immigration system, or reproductive rights, etc. what has Biden actually done to make the case for himself as the lesser of two evils? As far as I know basically the only accomplishments of the Biden admin are the infrastructure package and taking credit for the economy.

I guess a left lib would probably agree with those, but obviously money for infrastructure in this country is more like a government handout for deeply corrupt construction companies. And I would personally advise libs to stop trying to take credit for Biden fixing the economy. Just because the line goes up doesn’t mean the economy is good. Or if it does then whether the economy is good or not doesn’t matter to the lives of normal working people because the cost of everything is absolutely fucked. And sure, maybe Biden can’t wave his presidential hand and fix that, but he shouldn’t take credit for it.

There’s no way that, in the movie canon, John Wick was a marine. Come on, that’s so lame. It’s revealed in the second movie, I think, that John Wick was born in the USSR, trained from early childhood to be an assassin for the criminal syndicates that control the underworld. They don’t need to say “he’s badass because he was a marine.” John Wick doesn’t need that. Being a marine doesn’t make the character more interesting, it makes him worse.

I looked it up and found a reddit post that claims one of his tattoos is a latin motto that is popular among marines, and also that the video game payday 2 claims he was one. I’m going to discount payday 2 because I doubt whoever wrote John Wick’s blurb had access to whatever story bible the John Wick team has. As for the tatto, I mean, he is a soldier of fortune, but for the criminal underworld. It’d make sense for him to have a tattoo like that without ever having been in the military.

Also that reddit post, which speculates that John was discharged from the military for being mentally unstable, has this line: “Of course, John would never get to be a Marine if he had psychological issues before being in the army.”

Anyway, here’s my impression of Jarhead John being asked how he became the world’s deadliest man:

“Hey John, is it true you incredible fighting ability is due to the fact that you were fostered by each of the world’s most powerful crime syndicates, trained in their fighting styles, and then spent ten years with the secret, still extant Order of Assassins?”

“Oh, yeah, that was cool, but most of it came down to being yelled at by a guy in fatigues for a few months and then calling in airstrikes any time we heard a noise.”

Yeah, we had them peer into the depths of our magic orb which would then determine for us who could stay and who had to go. Turns out all the queers in the country have scoliosis. Weird, right?

Dragon’s Dogma 2 has been a blast.

Got a video quote tweeted into my timeline that was a TikTok of what I assumed to be a woman in her early twenties, wearing a sports bra and leggings, dancing while lip syncing to a song. Then I read the quote tweeters tweet which was “in 2022 everybody thought she was a tomboy but she was actually just sixteen.” A little disturbed I kept scrolling only to be served someone else qt-ing the vid saying “now that she’s matured and her figure’s filled out, nobody is simping.” I click into the comments to see if that was a misogynist attack against the woman or some sort of commentary on who men will simp for. One of the replies to that tweet was “what do you mean matured she hasn’t hit 18.”

Dear Elon Musk and I guess whoever runs TikTok, if your apps could not show me videos of teenagers in their underwear, especially minors, that’d be great.

Watched the movie Harry Brown. On the one hand, an insane conservative fantasy in which a modern knight, a vigilante, a good guy with a gun, can kill all the bad drug dealers and bring lasting peace and change to his crime-ridden estate. Which is rendered comically hilarious by the fact that that vigilante is none other than the 75-year-old Michael Caine. On the other hand, politics aside, a really very good movie. I particularly liked the first thirty to forty-five minutes, which when they weren’t fearmongering about crime was a meditative look at the life of a very old man who had lost everyone he’d ever loved. Not even to crime, just the vicissitudes of time.

If the film had ended with a scene where a new gang moves in to fill the void, and all the struggle and action of the film was for naught, I’d respect it a lot more. Poors killing poors and achieving nothing at all while the police slap themselves on the back for a job well done. Instead it ends with a scene where, after Michael Caine kills the criminal ringleaders, things on the estate are fine. 4/10, could have been a 9 or maybe even a 10 if the ending wasn’t so silly.

What if all mankind is affected with a psychic virus that changes Sydney Sweeney to Mao Zedong, and vice versa?

That’s right, a blonde white lady led the Chinese Communist Revolution, and all heterosexual American men are drooling over the “bodacious ta-tas” (to borrow a phrase from our friend, and clearly het man, Rod Dreher) of an old Chinese guy.

A lib on my timeline posted the poem “voting as fire extinguisher”

In response to a thread about how even if you hate the west, a collapse of the American empire will be very bad for everyone and it will disproportionately affect third worlders and the marginalized and so you should fight to stave off collapse… by voting for democrats.

And all I can think is that the joke there is that the fire extinguisher is empty. More than that, it was never filled in the first place. The company tasked with making them realized it’d be cheaper to make cans in the shape of extinguishers but without the fire removedant.

For one, it should be obvious that everyone in the political class is beholden to the corporate and military interests that actually govern the nation. Two, even if that weren’t true, and Joe Biden or name any other democrat here genuinely wanted to stop the far-right, they just clearly aren’t the men for the moment. They are not going to, by force of will, alter the historical epoch that is unfolding. They don’t believe in anything enough to even try.

Lastly, if America is collapsing, then the collapse began long ago. I might suggest the War in Afghanistan as the start, but I’m no historian. Even if Biden wanted to stop it, even if he was the man for the moment, the moment’s long past.

So somebody on Twitter posted a diatribe about how it doesn’t make sense for disabled people to exist in Fantasy settings because magic, accompanied by this image of a wizard in a wheelchair in a classic D&D style dungeon:

Which has led to a lot of discourse. In one faction you’ve got what I’d charitably call the well-meaning-but-ultimately-confused pedants. I saw a Skallagrim take along these lines. Their position can be summed up as “well, if a real wheelchair-bound person went into a cave system that was full of men with swords who wanted to kill her LOGICALLY she would quickly be killed. Disabled people can exist in medieval fantasy settings, but it’s IMMERSION-BREAKING to make them frontline warrior types.” Then you’ve got well-meaning pedants arguing back “it’s fantasy, you could enchant the wheelchair, or replace it with a magical cat or something.” Both of them missing the forest for the trees when the real argument, set forth by the OP and their faction of fash eugenicists, is that disabled people shouldn’t exist.

Rather than arguing about the rules or expectations of any given game or setting, I think it’s a better point to say that art is metaphorical, that any deliberate inclusion or exclusion of disabled people is a choice made by the person or people telling that story. Fiction is not bound to what you think is and is not possible in the real world. I’m starting to view a preoccupation for what is and isn’t logical in a piece of fiction to be utter tedium. You don’t have to try and justify the presence of the wheelchair by saying it’s enchanted or that, actually, the disabled person is being carried by a clockwork machine, or saying “well, they can be a wizard or healer, but they can’t be in close combat.” It doesn’t matter. It’s not real. Even if it was literally impossible in the real world for someone to do these things, it doesn’t have to be in fiction.

Also, is a D&D Barbarian in a wheelchair any less ‘realistic’ or ‘immersion breaking’ than batman winning a 10v1 melee or Clint Eastwood outdrawing and gunning down a half-dozen gunfighters simultaneously?

TikTok has informed me there’s a sitcom set in a supermarket. I’m imagining, without seeing the show or even reading anything about it, that the show is a The US Office style “the people you work with are your found family” saccharine bullshit.

That’s bad enough, but even if the show isn’t like that I can hardly imagine a grimmer setting for a sitcom than a supermarket.

Oh, I did forget about gimlets. I should get me some of those.

I don’t have anything useful to add, I just want to share my own misadventures with the hand brace. I’d found a brace at a local consignment store. Good working order, no rust, I think I paid $5 for it. But I’ve never been able to find any of the bits that those chucks take. I’ve heard of braces made with a chuck that could take modern octagonal bits, but the one I’ve got needs the traditional square-shanked bit. I ended up buying modern auger bits at the hardware store, and ultimately I was able to drill a 3/4” hole through a 4x4, so it can be made to work. But it was a pain.

Last year I found a complete set of vintage bits online for $100. 13 bits, from 1/4” to 1”. But for me a hundred bucks is a lot to spend on what are ultimately specialty drill bits. Especially when I know I could go to the hardware store and buy a cheap cordless drill, a set of general purpose bits, and also auger bits for probably under $75. For me the hand brace is an aesthetic choice, not a practical one. I like that there’s no noise, I like that it doesn’t need power, I like that there’s no plastic components. But I don’t need it. I don’t need to worry about the noise, I’ve never been without electric power a day in my life, it’s a largely impractical aesthetic choice.

So I bought the bits, because what’s the point in being practical? And they came unsharpened. I need a safe-edged file to sharpen them with, but I don’t have a bench grinder, and I’ve been too lazy to borrow my old man’s. Also, I’m definitely worried I’ll ruin my bits by filing them wrong.

Tangentially, Peter Follansbee has a good blog post about some historical wooden hand braces, I wanna say from Dutch colonists from the late 17th century. If I can dig it up I’ll post a link.

https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/wooden-brace/