When you say it pops off and becomes an axe… is this like a wafer-thin flexible piece of metal attached to his chest that stiffens and becomes an axe-shaped blade, or has he got a big heavy axe head attached to his chest all the time?
Because if it’s the latter, that’s just a bit silly, but if it’s the former, that doesn’t even make a lick of goddamn sense. An axe is useful because of all the weight in the head. Anything without that weight would just be a huge pizza slicer.
Write a brief introductory paragraph on the subject of business theory as if you were a three-armed gargoyle teaching a first year college class on the subject.
Greetings, fledgling scholars! I am Professor Thraxxor, your three-armed guide to the mystic labyrinth of business theory—where spreadsheets whisper secrets and invisible hands tug at the fabric of markets. With one hand I’ll gesture toward classical economics, with another I’ll sketch diagrams of organizational behavior, and with the third—ah yes—that one’s just for throwing chalk at nappers. In this course, we’ll examine the ancient and evolving forces that govern commerce, from Adam Smith’s hallowed halls to the chaos of modern corporate strategy. Stay alert—capitalism waits for no one.
—via ChatGPT
I adore Porco Rosso for its gentle simplicity.
When Marnie Was There… hit me in the emotions in a way that I was not prepared for, and I love it for that.
You could really be a Beau Brummell, baby, if you just give it half a chance.
Hey, hey, hey. Once in a while there’s one that gives kind of a
fascist Barbie kind of a vibe.
Well, it sounds like one could survive a barrel roll.
Bible:
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
Christians: Got it.
Stephanie: I used to be called Mark, but now I’m Stephanie.
Christians: Does not compute.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder’s jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Every day we get closer to the All-Despising Baby Skull.
It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.
Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.
There was a lot of pioneering in the 70’s. The first home computers, the first video games, the first mobile phones, all right there in the late 70’s. Most people ended the 70’s living like they did in the 60’s but now there’s cool shit like the Speak n’ Spell. The average American home in 1979 had no microwave oven, a landline telephone and a TV that might have even been color. There were some nerds who had TRS-80s, some of them even had a modem so they could 300 baud each other. Normies saw none of this.
There was a lot of invention in the 80’s. Home computer systems, video games etc. as we now commonly know them crystalized in the 80’s. We emerged from the 80’s with Nintendo as the dominant video game console platform, Motorola as basically the only name in cellular telephones and with x86 PCs running Microsoft operating systems as the dominant computing platform with Apple in a distant but solid second place. Video games were common, home computers weren’t that out there, people still had land lines, and maybe cable TV or especially if you were out in the sticks you might have one of those giant satellite dishes. If you were a bit of an enthusiast you might have a modem to dial BBSes and that kind of stuff, but basically no one has an email address.
There was a lot of evolution in the 90’s. With the possible exception of the world wide web which was switched on in August of '91, there weren’t a lot of changes to how computing worked throughout the decade. Compare an IBM PS/2 from 1989 with a Compaq Presario from 1999. 3 1/4" floppy disk, CRT monitor attached via VGA, serial and parallel ports, keyboard and mouse attached via PS2 ports, Intel architecture with Microsoft operating system…it’s the same machine 10 years later. The newer machine runs orders of magnitude faster, has orders of magnitude more RAM etc. but it still broadly speaking fills the same role in the user’s life. An N64 is exactly what you’d expect the NES to look like after a decade. Cell phones have gotten sleeker and more available but it’s still mostly a telephone that places telephone calls, it’s the same machine Michael Douglas had in that one movie but now no longer a 2 pound brick. Bring a tech savvy teen from 1989 to 1999 and it won’t take long to explain everything to him. The World Wide Web exists now, but a lot of retailers haven’t embraced the online marketplace, the dotcom bubble bursts, it’s not quite got the permanent grip on life yet.
There was a lot of revolution in the 2000’s. Higher speed internet that allow for audio and video streaming, mp3 players and the upheaval those caused, the proliferation of digital cameras, the rise of social media. When I graduated high school in 2005, there were no iPhones, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Youtube. Google was a search engine that was gaining ground against Yahoo. The world was a vastly different place by the time I was through college. Take that savvy teen from 1989 and his counterpart from 1999 and explain to them how things work in 2009. It’ll take a lot longer. In 2009 we had a lot of technology that had a lot of potential, and we were just starting to realize that potential. It was easy to see a bright future.
There was a lot of stagnation in the 2010’s. We started the decade with smart phones and social media, and we ended the decade with smart phones and social media. Performance numbers for machines kept going up but you kinda don’t notice; you buy a new phone and it’s so much faster and more responsive, 4 years later it barely loads web pages and takes forever to launch an app because mobile apps are gaseous, they expand to take up their system. A lot of handset manufacturers have given up so now there are fewer options, and they’ve converged to basically one form factor. Distinguishing features are gone, things we used to be able to do aren’t there anymore. The excitement wore off, this is how we do things now, and now everyone is here. Mobile app stores are full of phishing software, you’re probably better advised to just use the mobile browser if you can, mainstream video gaming is now just skinner boxes, and by the end of the decade social media is all about propaganda silos and/or attention draining engagement slop.
Now we arrive in the 2020’s where we find a lot of sinisterization. A lot of the tech world is becoming blatantly, nakedly evil. In truth this began in the 2010’s, it’s older than 4 years, but we’re days away from the halfway point of the decade and it’s becoming difficult to see the behavior of tech and media companies as driven only by greed, some of this can only come from a deep seated hatred of your fellow man. People have latched onto the term “enshittification” because it’s got the word shit in it and that’s hilarious, but…I see a spectrum with the stagnation of the teens represented with a green color and the sinisterization of the 20’s represented with red, and the part in the middle where red and green make brown is enshittification.
Yeah, when asking “What would Jesus do?” it’s important to remember that extraordinary violence might be one of the answers.
I would do that with the spray paint, then select two colors on the bucket and fill them in alternating back and forth, slowly progressing outward, until the entire picture was one color. Good times.
Dammit, you’re right! I might not even have a legit job! All that money in my bank account might be from blackout bus station blow jobs!
I don’t watch her 24 hours a day! I can’t say, with certainty, that she doesn’t transform into a dragon and fight gremlins in a parallel dimension when I’m not around! It’s a fundamentally impossible question to answer, short of “To the best of my knowledge…”
Not that I necessarily think they’re trying to discriminate against people with autism giving blood, but there’s one of these on the blood donation intake questionnaire.
Intake Questionnaire: In the last year, have you used any illegal drugs via needle injection?
Me: No.
IQ: In the last year, have you had sex with anyone who uses illegal drugs via needle injection?
Me (married): Well, it’s not as if I can keep an eye on my wife 24/7… you know what, I’m just going to mark it No.
IQ: In the last year, have you had sex for money?
Me: No.
IQ: In the last year, have you had sex with anyone who has had sex for money?
Me: I’M TELLING YOU, I CAN’T KEEP AN EYE ON HER AT ALL TIMES, SO FUNDAMENTALLY I CANNOT GIVE A CERTAIN ANSWER TO THAT QUESTION!
There comes a point when a person, organization, or country is so obscenely wealthy that the normal human mind can’t readily grasp just what that kind of wealth means. A normal person hears “bespoke private 747” and thinks “Wow! That’s worth rather a lot!” An obscenely wealthy person thinks “Yeah, I’m pretty sure I’ve got a couple of those parked somewhere. I bet I could pack one full of listening devices and pass it off as a special gift.”
“You know, you’d be a lot better without a penis!”
👊✊
“Woah, hey! You can keep the beard!”
“HALLELUJAH!”