I just haven’t noticed really. The reality is that memes, even ones that were made by hand with a lot of effort, are disposable content. Most of them will get looked at for like 10 seconds tops before you either move on or maybe check out the comments. Nobody who isn’t obsessed with finding the AI slop is going to notice the difference between an AI meme and just a shitty photoshop job.

That’s not to say I’m not concerned by the effects of that. Lower effort needed means more low effort stuff, but it’s not really something I’ve clocked as being particularly out of the ordinary.

Ok this one got me laughing. Congrats.

Most of them don’t seem to give a shit about Jewish people, they just have ulterior motives for supporting Israel. Arm sales, geopolitical strategy, hating Muslims, lebenstraum, and then there’s the crazy Christians who support it because of the rapture stuff. Then there are the Jewish people who delusionally believe that somehow having a state which is solely dependent on the US empire’s support is somehow going to protect them from another holocaust and think that priority overrides everything else. I can’t think of ANYONE I know who can genuinely square support for Israel with any kind of Jewish religious values. Because they can’t. Because that would be insane.

When an actual Jewish person comes out against Israel, they just call them a self hating Jew. Yup. Nothing antisemitic about that. They must just really want to protect Jewish people from… checks notes… ourselves.

Nice ending to the season. I figured the kids were coming back to life. I don’t know if that was meant to be a twist with just how telegraphed it was over the last 2 episodes. I was both surprised and not surprised by Shi Sui being alive. I thought she didn’t seem like she was planning to die and had some kind of plan, but then she got shot… a lot. I don’t know how she survived that. Did she have ye olde bullet proof vest and blood squibs?

Jinshi still can’t take a hint. That whole relationship feels like one of those things that would be creepy if they weren’t playing it off as cutesy/comedic.

I’m looking forward to S3. From the teaser trailer I’m hopeful that we’re going to get some kind of status quo shift/reset so we can get back to the more Mao Mao focused stories. But we’ll see.

Yeah as much as I love the show, the political intrigue has mostly just confused/bored me. I just want more bits with Mao Mao being Mao Mao. I don’t know the source material, but the S3 teaser makes me think we’re going to get away from all of that since it says they’re going to a distant land. Seems like a reset.

Angela Collier: She’s a physicist who does videos on science or science adjacent topics. Most of her videos are pretty funny and accessible and if you’re more interested in math stuff, she has a few videos or segments of videos that go more into that.

Girlfriend Reviews: Comedic game reviews.

Jenny Nicholson: Video essays/rants about various pop culture things.

Lindsay Ellis: Video essays. Although I think she’s mostly been posting on Nebula now. But her old videos are decent.

Simone Giertze: Comedic maker. Started out doing shitty robots but has evolved more into a design channel. The videos are still funny, but the projects are more sincere attempts to make something fun or useful.

Luna Oi!: She’s Vietnamese and does English language videos about modern Vietnamese history and contemporary life/politics from that perspective. Really interesting if your only previous exposure to the country was a brief bit about the Vietnamese war in history class.

I was watching a friend who got it and he tried it solo initially before swapping to online play and it seemed waaaay harder. Not sure if he screwed up a setting and it was really the 3 player version or something.

A while ago I tried it out and I can concur on it feeling clunky. To each their own, but I just have a fairly low tolerance for games not feeling smooth to play. There are a lot of games I’ve dropped in less than an hour because it just didn’t feel good to play even if I might have liked some of the ideas or systems.

Actually, I didn’t know about this before I looked into it, but that wasn’t the first of it’s kind. Apparently that started with a story called "The Vampyre"from 1819. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vampyre

Huh. I had thought that Vampires were just a metaphor for the nobility. Rich guy who lives in a manor and sucks the life from the common folk to sustain themselves. But I just did some quick searching on that and apparently that’s a (relatively) more recent version of them (1800s), but a version of them existed in earlier Eastern European folklore as basically zombies way before that.

Anyway, I could definitely see a lot of what you’re saying, although from what I can tell, the garlic thing has more to do with medical matters than behavior. The two things I’ve seen are that 1) Garlic is an antiseptic, so it was thought to ward off evil probably because it helped reduce disease. 2) Apparently there is a disease that has garlic intolerance as a symptom. Although it also looks like that’s disputed. It can be hard to nail down stuff like this.

I think we might need a book to answer that. A comment seems insufficient.

They were successfully beaten down. More specifically, the ORGANIZATIONS were beaten down. The most successful protest movements weren’t people spontaneously showing up in the streets. They were the culmination of the efforts of community organizing. There was planning and they had people they could rely on and who relied on them. But things like unions and the Black Panthers were violently destroyed.

Now protesting is atomized like everything else. A protest that forms by posting to show up somewhere at some time on social media with signs is a collection of individuals rather than a group. If you’re just surrounded by strangers you don’t know, are you going to be able to take more radical actions?

That’s not to say none of the more serious/organized protests are happening though. There were those water protectors who tried to stop that pipeline. There were the rail worker and dockworker strikes. I don’t know how organized it was, but it was heartening to see the LA protests start out by actively protecting people being targeted by ICE. And perhaps there are more that just didn’t get any media attention. But in any case, you see how hard they try to crack down on those. But sometimes they can succeed.

I briefly tried making YouTube videos (didn’t really stop for any reason other than my usual inability to stick with anything) and when I got a handful of views and comments my reaction was “wait who the fuck is watching this?”

The quick answer is that the Democratic Party isn’t socialist. Socialists work against the interests of capitalists and guess who the Democratic Party takes a lot of money from? The few socialists or democratic socialists that try to run through the Democratic party are fighting an uphill battle and are only doing so mostly because the two party system makes it impossible for 3rd parties to win in most cases.

This has always been the case, but what might cause this confusion is that the Democrats appeared to favor more socially oriented policies in the mid 20th century with The New Deal and The Great Society. But the thing to understand about that is:

• Despite creating some social spending programs, they kept capitalists in power.
• They never stopped doing the other part of capitalism: Imperialism.
• There was a lot of pressure from outside the government. Unions were stronger. The Great Depression was the greatest crisis capitalism had seen up until that point, and the success of communist revolutions in other countries could have shown the American working class a different path forward.

In the 90s, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the power of unions thoroughly gutted, the Democrats under Clinton did a realignment to the right. Clinton famously passed welfare “reform” (read: gutting it) calling it “an end to welfare as we know it.” Clinton entered us into NAFTA, a trade deal that helped facilitate corporations moving production to other countries to exploit cheaper labor. He passed the Crime Bill which is credited with being a huge contributor to mass incarceration. Etc.

Since then Democrats have looked a lot more like Clinton than FDR, and even FDR wasn’t a socialist. So yeah, the people who helped take things away from the working class aren’t super thrilled about someone who wants to take some of that stuff back for us.

To provide a simple historical example without getting into too much of the theory, consider the progression from The New Deal to where we are now. That was about as close as the US got to social democracy and that’s been all but destroyed over the following decades by capitalists. But yeah they should definitely read more if they want to understand the mechanisms in more detail.

Some genuinely mind boggling innovations in UX and AI (not to mention battery) would have to happen to make it even close. There is just way too much that is too awkward to do on a smaller screen or without a proper kbm + the posture of sitting at a desk. You never really see anyone actually using those sci fi handheld devices. They always just kind of magically pull up whatever information is needed without us seeing whatever inputs were required to get there.

Only sort of related: But I always find it funny when I see some older sci fi able to imagine some technology way ahead of it’s time, but fail to think through the implications of how humans will actually interact with it. That’s the part you actually have some info and intuition on even without the technology. If I lived in the 60s I might not have been able to tell you whether we’d ever be able to fit the computers that take up rooms into the palms of our hands, but if you showed me a handheld computer and asked me to suspend my disbelief about the technical wizardry behind it, I could probably tell you whether or not I think someone would actually use something in that way because technology changes, but people don’t. Until we go trans humanist we still have the limits of two hands, 10 fingers, etc.

One funny example of this for me is the pad from Star Trek TNG. There are actually two relevant pieces of technology here:

1. A portable computer that can presumably at least display and edit information.
2. A ship wide computer that can do all sorts of complicated tasks, has artificial intelligence, a voice interface, and can be accessed via terminals, including personal ones around the ship.

Despite this, they couldn’t put two and two together and imagine that the pads might be connected through the ship’s computer. When crew members want to send information they have on the pads, instead of just sending data through the computer to the other person’s pad/terminal… THEY GIVE THE PHYSICAL PAD TO THE OTHER PERSON LIKE ITS A PIECE OF PAPER!

“No really guys. THIS time we got him for sure!”

I wish I still lived in the fantasy world where this was plausible.

If we lived in the cars universe the cabs would be low wage workers instead of property, so the media wouldn’t actually care.

Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.

If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.