Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.

The Great Male Renunciation is the historical phenomenon at the end of the 18th century in which wealthy men of the Western world stopped using bright colours, elaborate shapes and variety in their dress, which were left to women’s clothing.

I think it’s possible that Robert Trump, Donald Trump’s younger brother, was an early victim of COVID. He died suddenly and was “very ill” but no specific cause was ever mentioned AFAIK. I think this was covered up because it was politically inconvenient for his brother.

I have nothing to really base it on except the timing and reaction was suspect.

The first Underworld from 2003 is like this, but it’s painfully early 2000s. It’s from that era when every action movie was ripping of The Matrix as hard as possible.

One time I worked on something where a character threw a spear. For some reason they didn’t have a spear on set and asked the actor to just pretend. Then our instructions from the director were to make the actor twirl the spear before he threw it. Just because it looks super cool to twirl stuff, I guess.

Not only did the actor not pretend to twirl it, the shot was about 30 frames long (one second is 24 frames). So we had like 15 frames to make him twirl this giant spear, which the actor didn’t do. It was either make it look like dog shit or make a full, hero digital double and completely re-do the shot as 100% CGI, which there wasn’t time or budget for.

Yeah, it looked like dog shit. The whole project did.

I’m not a huge traveler, but I’ve been to the UK and parts of Europe. The Czech Republic was my favorite place, of the places I’ve been. Ironically never been to Canada, despite having some extended family there. I would love to go, and I love being in foreign places, but I hate getting there. Travel is awful, especially now.

I’ve lived in both urban and rural areas, and the fear is constant everywhere among people who have never traveled. Urban people are afraid that everyone in the country is a Deliverance KKK member, and rural people think the cities are a gang-infested war zone. What’s wild is that, unlike visiting other countries, they could just hop in the car and visit the city or countryside for a weekend. They are consuming lazy media tropes and taking them as fact.

Traveling, even just regional travel, would benefit a lot of people in the USA. We have way more in common with each other than with the oligarchs.

I know someone who dresses like this IRL. She’s fully committed to the style, it’s great.

Watching videos has been broken for a few weeks. On the 24th of Sep they mentioned that they’d identified a potential cause, but since then there haven’t been any updates. They typically aren’t super communicative and tend to lock down posts because of the huge surge of duplicate bug reports and unhelpful comments they get whenever this happens. So the silence is not that unusual, but it has been slightly longer than usual for an update.

2004 would be a bit late but it kind of reminds me of MPlayer.com. Here’s a video. The interface kind of looked like a radio, it also featured the first voice-chat I ever used, but everyone was on modem so it was unusably terrible.

There’s actually enough channels like this that I think it qualifies as a genre. They kind of give me “tradwife” vibes so I don’t really watch them, but it seems like quite a few are in France for some reason (maybe some government program where you can get these properties cheaply).

If you’re into visual arts, “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri is pretty great.

So I quickly gave myself diabetes…

I don’t want to die, but if I could un-exist like Marty McFly disappearing from a photograph I would choose it in an instant. I have a pretty privileged life but, even for me, if I try to honestly inventory my experience there appears to be more suffering than pleasure. I don’t think this is unfair or unnatural, I believe suffering is integral to being alive because it’s how organisms respond and adapt to a world that is constantly trying to dis-organize them. Basically you can’t have life without it, given the laws of physics.

I don’t think “humans are a virus” is correct because it’s a pejorative and I don’t think viruses or humans are inherently bad. If I was going to classify anything as bad it would be the capacity to suffer, which is so foundational it actually informs the concept of “bad” rather than they other way around. I think suffering also becomes more acute the more processing power you have. Unfortunately for Agent Smith, the “virus” is intelligence and the machines already caught it.

I admit my ideas are probably half-baked on this because I just don’t feel articulate or intelligent enough to describe it. All I have is my own experience. As far as I can see, it appears that more complex animals have a greater capacity for suffering than less complex ones. It seems that the mechanisms of suffering are “body stuff”, mainly nerves, and more complex organisms simply have more of those in more robust configurations. This might just be cope, because the alternative is horrific. As a kid I looked through a microscope and saw an entire world of rotifers and paramecia ripping each other apart, struggling for energy, and realized that if all organisms can experience the same “level” of suffering than we are truly in Hell. It was literally inconceivable.

I don’t care for the “antinatalist” label. I admit that suffering is hard to quantify and may be totally subjective. This is why I don’t mind what other people choose to believe. It’s none of my business. Based on my subjective experience I will not be doing so. Sometimes people pry into why I don’t have kids and I am forced to expose my beliefs. Suddenly, in their eyes, I become an evangelist. I’m not. They won’t engage with the notion of 'the non-existent mind". They constantly argue from the position of a hypothetical mind that chooses stuff. Eventually they think I’m suicidal because in their mind dying and non-existence are the same. They also get angry and insulted even though I’m leaving more resources for their own children by not having my own which, by their logic, should be good. So I just don’t bother. Do what you want. Maybe they are right.

I really like this website for exploring all the options. Not sure how up to date it is with this latest ffmpeg.

https://ffmpeg.lav.io/

I still think about the dude who repeatedly put massive amounts of paraquat on his balls, and died, instead of just getting some antibiotics.

In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.

Python is actually pretty baller with string operations too since so much of the C has been heavily optimized.

This is just some library too, not their main application. I know “lines of code” is bullshit but just for reference I looked it up and apparently curl is ~180k lines of code. I can’t imagine how crufty this fucking code must be, assuming this is even real because it seems too ludicrous.

The Naked Lunch. I was probably 10 years old? I didn’t understand any of the plot, I was weirded the fuck out and the giant bugs made me sick to my stomach.

Yeah, it’s impossible to develop a greenfield site without scraping everything off. You have to create and get approval on water runoff management plan for any new development. That means grading everything and often these days it also means managing and impounding water on-site without dumping it all into the (overloaded) storm drain system. When there’s no grass you have to install silt fences to keep silt out of nearby streams while building. You can’t get final approval, and remove the silt fence, until there is some kind of ground cover and that basically means grass since it grows fast and is easy to apply. Even if you somehow left the trees there’s no way they’d survive the process.

Fuck McMansion developers, and fuck lawns, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a reflection of an entire system of land-use policy and not just stupidity, or whatever.