And the voices. “Billy…”

“You fucked the whole thing up.”

“Billy, your time is up.”

“Your time… is up.”

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: January 9th, 2024

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  • There is a particular type of emotion which “The VVitch” and “Hereditary” get absolutely perfect. It’s actually not really my favorite type of movie; it’s not particular scary, per se, but it is just some stuff that is really awful that you don’t want to see. If you don’t want that, they may not be good, but if you vibe with that particular emotion they are hard to beat for it.

    The HBO “Chernobyl” miniseries is absolutely straight-up horror. It has pretty much all the elements of a perfect horror movie, except it’s (with tiny exceptions and artistic licenses) all 100% true.

    “As Above, So Below” is fairly good “normal” horror of a fairly unspicy flavor.

    That’s honestly all I can think of that really does it well. Horror books in my experience are far better. “The Shining,” “Pet Semetary,” “Night Shift,” and “Skeleton Crew.” Also lots and lots of HP Lovecraft; the “Dunwich Horror” collection is wonderful.

    Hope this helps.



  • Weird angel investor took us all out to a fancy dinner and made a weird extensive speech about the importance of the future; kind of “Godspeed my young protégés I know you’ll do wonderful things.” Kind of sounded like he finally believed in us and wanted to let us know with a nice gesture. Idk. No one could make any sense of it.

    The next day his lackey informed us we were all fired. Oooh, that’s what that was about; makes sense, oh well, we have to get real jobs now apparently.


  • Do you see any scenario where the IDF can allow itself to truly stop Innocent people? A soldier is being fired at from a school, should the soldier allow himself to get killed in such situation?

    The whole concept is bankrupt. An IDF soldier is being fired at from a school because he is on Palestinian land, occupying it by force to maintain the land that was stolen from the Palestinians and facilitate the taking of more.

    There are degrees. If he’s sniping schoolchildren, then that will inflame the conflict more and promote more October 7ths. If he’s “only” firing back at the school, so “defending” himself… well, it’s “better” I guess, but if you break in my house in the middle of the night and I attack you, you’re not “defending” yourself even if you limit yourself to fighting with me and not hurting my wife.

    And vice versa, considering what you know about setlers in Israel, do you really think that they will not get even more violent in the west bank if they know that their actions has no cost?

    Their actions don’t seem to have a cost though. Or rather the mechanism of retribution is so indirect and random that I don’t think that Hamas’s counterattacks make all that much difference to their calculus of what they can get away with doing to the Palestinians. I could be wrong, but that’s my impression.

    And don’t get me wrong, I wish for Hamas to vanish, and I wish for the IDF to kill only militants (even that definition is not clear), just like you. But I don’t see any realistic scenario (considering the human spirit) that this can happen. Not in the current political situation.

    Like I said, even “killing only militants” leaves Israel in the position of the war criminal. They are invading and stealing homes, farms, anything they can find and pushing the Palestinians into a vanishingly small series of refuges which they then invade in turn. Why would “militants” not fight back in that scenario? What should they do instead?

    I do agree with your take on how unrealistic peace is in the present climate. It needs to be imposed from outside by force in order to happen, which won’t happen, because the US would need to be actively involved in making that happen and the US likes things more or less as they are (or at least as they were before the counterattack after October 7th got so genocidal that it started causing political issues for leaders in the US).







  • Offer to bet him money about the outcome of some real world event that is contingent on the way he is claiming that things are

    IDK how you can apply that to AI; that’s not the best one. But you can bet that there are no workers dying of heatstroke in Amazon-supplier warehouses. You can bet him that Trump has agreed to honor the results of the election. Etc etc.

    It’s very easy to just make statements at each other. If you offer to back up your statements, then he can either refuse (in which case it’ll be harder for him to say he’s definitely right and you’re definitely wrong), or agree and then one or the other of you will learn something.

    It’s up to you. You can also just let it go. But if you want to prove him wrong it is easier to do with questions and real-world actions than it is by coming up with the perfect statements. As you’ve discovered, he’s not obligated to react to statements any way other than how he’s decided to react to them.


  • Yeah. Dates where something HAPPENS are in my experience an S tier idea. Walking around the park, playing a game, interacting in some way. All good things. Like I say, getting buzzed and playing ping pong and flirting was fuckin magic. But both of us being in our go karts with helmets on and 0 interaction and the stress of “wtf I am going way too fast what if I crash this thing I hate this so much” is a little bit less of an S tier idea. Definitely for a first date at least.


  • I wanted to take a girl out. But I wanted to do something fun. I was sick of getting coffee; watching movies is worse. It’s just fuckin awkward. I had taken a girl some time before for beers and ping pong one time, and we had a fuckin BLAST. And so, I thought to myself, what is fun? Like ping pong fun? I know! Go karts are fun! Let’s do some go karts!

    And so for my first date with this poor girl we went to a go karts place and got in our little go kart suits and raced go karts around the track. That was the day that I learned that not all girls like go karts. Idk; she thought I was unique I guess; she tried to have a good time and we kept seeing each other after. But she referred to the go karts date as her “trauma” and regularly gave me shit for it after, and for my general lack of any kind of adult understanding of women or life in general.

    TL;DR apparently I am 12 years old I guess






  • No, working-class people are 12% richer (inflation adjusted) than they used to be, and that’s a pretty fuckin significant number given the obstacles of Covid and Republicans that were standing in the way. The numbers are, 32% gains, 20% inflation, equals 12% gain inflation adjusted.

    “Keep complaining” in the sense of advocating for better, finding more people who will help you get those outcomes and trying to work out how to get them in charge, sounds great. “Keep complaining” in the sense of blaming the people who are fighting for you for not doing a better job, and implying that them trying to give you trillions of dollars and partially succeeding is basically the same as the people who want to end democracy (and also steal back that money and more), is stupid. In my opinion.


  • People being dissatisfied with politics is the very first step required to actually change anything.

    I don’t think there is a shortage of dissatisfaction with politics in this country. There might be some imaginary country where if everyone would just get disaffected and cynical enough, the problems would get dealt with, but I think most of America’s problem at this point is in the action piece.

    Yes, the current administration has done some good things, but none of it is nearly enough, and we should still be plenty mad about all of it.

    Plenty mad at the ones who are responsible, and invested in solutions that will move it in the right direction, yes. The reason I disagreed with the original poster is not that I don’t want to fix things, it is that their proposed solution is mostly disaffectation instead of anything that will be that solution.

    Specific side note: you say reduce income inequality, but regular people are way worse off financially than their parents were and that’s not going away without some real change and we haven’t actually seen anything moving in that direction

    Low-income wages went up 32% since 2019, as a result of a stronger NLRB backstopping a bunch of union gains and the results of spending a trillion dollars of increased corporate taxes on domestic manufacturing. Covid inflation ate up most but not all of that boost; if Biden hadn’t been handed an unfolding apocalypse with a lot of people still dependent on Covid assistance to live, I think it would have been a much more dramatic change, but it’s definitely not nothing. He also spent about 10 times what anyone else has spent on climate change, putting us on track for a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030.

    Is any of that enough? Fuck no. But it’s also definitely not “haven’t actually seen anything.” You may not have seen anything, because I think a lot of Lemmy posters are employed in tech, and that sector has still been a shit show where people aren’t keeping up with inflation. But the working class is actually doing substantially better than they were even before Covid, even under historic inflation. That’s pretty fuckin unusual. And shitting on it (saying those working-class people don’t represent “regular people”), or saying that because we haven’t undone multiple generations of fuckery in the space of a couple of years, it doesn’t count, is not something I agree with.