yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people’s wrists, at that time.

if anything, I would think it’d be the opposite. LEDs are pretty capable of more narrow bandwidths natively, but old streetlights used to be a more pure kind of yellowy color, because they were low pressure sodium vapor lamps. Those kinds of lamps give off an incredibly narrow bandwidth of yellow light, and are pretty energy efficient. I would think, as we’ve made the transition from that to more wide-bandwidth LEDs, more insects would be attracted to the lights, and more insects would die. But I’m not quite sure one way or the other.

The amount of remasters of once original successful games is increasing by the year.

There’s also a pretty substantial incentive there in terms of new market access, by releasing old games on new consoles, and less work overall. A better comparison in that regard, for most movies, would probably be re-releases, with original film remastering and DVD extras.

Yeah, you can kinda tell that as the series went on it started to be more and more a vehicle for really dumb stunts and action sequences. I feel like occasionally we get a movie or set of movies that are just cranked out by like, a production chock full of stuntmen. That’s fine, I suppose, it’s not unenjoyable, but I do much prefer something in the vein of Heat, or the original John Wick, rather than it’s sequels.

A better comparison might even be, like, any Jackie Chan movie, since those are all just basically vehicles for stunt work, but I think a comparison between those and the John Wick sequels is kind of self-evidently not a flattering comparison, for the sequels. Jackie Chan movies tend to have better, mostly self-contained plots, they tend to have much better and more impressive action, and action choreography, even if it’s almost intentionally less flashy. Even though obviously most of the stuff in the Jackie Chan movies is unrealistic, it still feels more real, because it’s all been actually done, relative to the John Wick movies, which tend to be more full of CGI, and kind of less real as a result of them being kind of, ridiculous murderfests. They become ungrounded.

Yeah, maybe that’s cause we don’t have nostalgia for any of the adapted properties they keep choosing over and over. The original star wars came out in 1970-something. Maybe some older Millennials have some nostalgia for the prequels, but even most of them tend to know that it sucks pretty hard. I feel like a lot of the millennial childhood movies, the nostalgia-bait, is gonna be stuff that are bad remakes or sequels of older movies. Gen-X had predator, Millennials had alien vs. predator: requiem. Maybe early Millennials had heathers, but mostly, Millennials have mean girls, which recently got a 1-to-1 musical remake, which wasn’t that good. Last two times they’ve tried to adapt avatar, it’s been pretty bad, as well. I just don’t have supreme confidence that anyone will really understand the appeal of any of these works or realistically be able to replicate them.

I think probably a primary driver of this is that a lot of these works’ appeal is rooted in their specific aesthetic, and hollywood as of late has felt very homogenized to greenscreen soundstages where everything is set in a concrete cityscape with overcast noonday lighting, because all the non-unionized CGI patsies are subject to a bunch of crunch time pressure where they just have to churn out garbage over and over. Also not helped by the amount of this which is done overseas, and can’t actively take any co-ordinated input in the middle of production. Mergers, leading to ballooning budgets, leading to shittier, more controlled, more generic products. Same shit has been happening in gaming, too. Easier to sell a committee decision on a remake, adaptation, or sequel, too, something that’s “proven” as a property, instead of an original IP.

That’s not even really to talk on how many Zoomers probably have nostalgia for early youtube videos, and shit like that, rather than mainstream movies or franchises. They don’t need to watch a remake of like, an old markiplier video, they can just tune into him doing basically the same thing he’s done for the last 15 years if they want a shitty nostalgia hit. I don’t need a remake of homestar runner, they’re still releasing shorts that I can watch occasionally. You can watch most of the same old guys because they’re still doing the same stuff they used to do. For the most part, anyways, lots of them got cancelled for being shitbags, or have had severe mental breaks. Still, point stands that, at the lower end especially, I can just go online and watch a bunch of amateur artists destroy their craft, I don’t need the movies or TV for those niche hits anymore.

Nah, I kinda like it, keeps my mornings sufficiently spicy and grounded. I tend to be more upbeat when I get too in my shit, and so it’s mostly better if I can browse around horrible doomposts and depressing shit when I need it. Certainly, I tend to like it better than cheerful nonsense that tends to either amount to played out references, or tribalistic bashing, though, that’s not to say doomposts can’t really be in that same vein either.

In any case, you’re gonna see them because they’re more likely to survive and get attention. This is good, for bringing awareness, maybe bad for explanatory power or sustained activism, but it strictly has more survival power in the attention economy, when compared to normal posts.

I wonder if some sort of pickled pineapple might work better for most people

I have a very strong suspicion that most people hate pineapple on pizza because they don’t have the genetics to counteract the enzymes in the pineapple. It is hard to like a pizza that actively hurts you to eat. I’ll also say that most hawaiian pizza that I’ve had, is horrible and sucks, no in terms of conceptual shortcomings, but just in terms of ingredient quality. They use precooked sliced lunch meat style ham, most of the time, and like, cold uncooked pineapple. The pineapple should be grilled, and the ham should be fried, I would think. Cooking the pineapple helps to cut down on some of the water content that ends up making the pizza cold and soggy, and cooking also helps to break down the enzymes that hurt your mouth.

The billionaire take is less of a hot take than the pineapple on pizza take. I think it’s kinda cause “the billionaire class” is something that people can more easily stick faces to, they’ve become more notable celebrities with the rise of silicon valley tech genius idiots. If you got rid of elon musk and jeff bezos, and maybe bill gates, I think like, a lot of the negative publicity against billionaires would evaporate overnight.

Lots of people are opposed more to the amount of brainspace they take up, and the lack of results they show, rather than being opposed to the idea of billionaires themselves, or, being opposed to the idea of capital, and capitalists. I get the sense that a lot of people would be perfectly fine with elon musk if he was investing in like, big public works projects and not stupid tunnels for his electric cars. I’ve seen quite a lot of people that just kinda hate the idea of someone having a billion dollars, just generally, kind of, in the way that you hate someone who dresses too ostentatiously, rather than having a more specific reason they hate them.

I don’t really like superhero movies as much as I like their animated counterparts. Teen titans, justice league, batman: the animated series, batman beyond, static shock, almost all the spiderman animated shows but especially spectacular spider man, avengers: earth’s mightiest heroes, the old silver surfer cartoon, the old X-Men animated series. Some of them are pretty good.

I think also a lot of people tend to hate superhero movies on the basis that they’re like. Pretentious twatbags. They can’t enjoy a campy, schlocky kind of movie, they have to watch something “good”, something that conforms to conventional definitions of “good”. Never could they enjoy watching mean girls. Lots of superhero movies, basically all of them to some degree, fall into the camp. Like blade, the original spiderman trilogy. Even marvel is kind of, one foot in the schlock and the cheese, and one foot in the “trying to be serious cinema with serious emotional stakes”, and they don’t always juggle it correctly.

I always thought that narrower pressure vessels could contain higher pressure, because the curvature is more severe, meaning that for a vessel that needs to retain a similar level of pressure, you could just use less material in the walls of the vessel. Is this not the case with these new cans, and they have the same wall thickness, or is the tradeoff just one that still works out to be in favor of more total aluminum usage?

Maybe but keys are already convenient and no training.

Well that was sort of my point, is that, despite the ease of access to this kind of idea, I’m pretty sure that, even just on the smell test, the “keys between the knuckles” strat wouldn’t really work. It strikes me more as something that might feel good to do, something that might assuage the kind of, passive anxiety, rather than being a good preventative measure.

Also, what do you mean by “the whale” in their life? I’ve never heard of this metaphor before.

Neither should lots of short haul trucking, more specifically drayage trucking, that industry sucks. We probably need to move more towards vans and stuff.

You know I find this to kind of be a somewhat depressing stereotype. Depressing both in the fact that these works are clearly marketed towards women as a sort of, precautionary measure against the somewhat justified paranoia, right, and the fact that this paranoia is somewhat justified is also depressing.

But it’s also depressing in that I’m pretty sure it’s not actually going to do anything to help you prevent yourself from being serially murdered, especially as I’m pretty sure serial murderers aren’t all that common. Most of these things are going to focus on your much less likely scenarios, and are going to just flood people with a sort of paranoid delusion that everyone is out to get them at all times. Which is kind of a hellish way to live your life.

I’m also not sure there’s realistically a chance most people have of catching a committed serial murderer. It’s sort of like how, the safest option for a cop to engage in, most times, is just to shoot everyone all the time, because anyone could be carrying a gun on them, and if they’re carrying a gun, then the people who win gunfights most of the time are the people who shoot first. It is very hard to protect against bad faith behavior, and against overwhelming opposing force. Or even mildly whelming force, if you’re just not really expecting it. Just as it is relatively hard for a committed, high profile criminal to escape justice for a longer period of time (especially if the cops have a good incentive to catch the perp, like, they’re a cop-killer, or a terrorist, or what have you), it is extremely hard to ensure that you’re not just gonna get taken advantage of by someone.

That’s not really to dissuade people from taking BJJ classes, or carrying pepper spray, or a whistle, or a gun on you, though, those things can still be effective and are pretty easy to integrate into your daily life. Especially in the case of BJJ, that might just be good exercise, but maybe the jury’s still out on whether or not your joints will be completely destroyed by the age of 50.

So, I think most people would probably be better served by understanding more thoroughly the warning signs of, say, a just straight up abusive or emotionally manipulative relationship, right, more common crimes, that don’t involve serial killers or the extreme and marketable violence featured in true crime. But then, as we’ve seen with the buzzwordification of “gaslighting”, and things of this nature, you can’t really be so sure that said education wouldn’t just be co-opted and used by the abusers themselves into more easily laundering their behavior. It’s probably still beneficial, in that if you know the identifying features of a duck, it’s harder for a duck to pose as not-a-duck, even if the duck knows what a duck is, right, but, yeah, it still has problems.

Then maybe the answer lies in, say, some sort of unironic self-help or therapeutic content, right, because that helps everyone, including potential abusers, but then that can be just as vulnerable to abuse. Not necessarily from abusers, but abuse from the financial nature of said content, which will be likely to provide easy solutions and shitty information just to make a quick buck, ime.

I’d still criticize all of this shit, this genre, on the basis of what I’ve all said, right, and I’d also criticize it in the format and execution of it’s entertainment, but I also think, right, we’re probably all better off if we just remain conscious of why we’re actually engaging with entertainment, instead of trying to come up with some sort of justification which doesn’t really pass the reality test. It’s mostly escapism. The pretense of reality is what everything uses to make itself more legitimate. That’s why men watch war history videos, and videos on guns that convince them they need to become right wing NRA wingnut prepper guys. Pretense of reality. As the other commenters have pointed out, there are parallels, here.

I always kinda wondered whether or not holding keys between your fingers would actually do anything if you punched someone, beyond just make them even more mad, especially as most people are not really trained in how to properly punch someone. I get the sense that a lot of other forms of self-defense would probably be better than that.

Oooh, an opportunity for a little bit longer of an article, don’t mind if I do.

I think it’s interesting to what extent people miss reasonable things about the past, but also, don’t really understand why things have changed and moved in the direction that they’ve moved in. They just kind of lament the slow death of the past, and that’s about it. There’s no through-line, it’s just a series of disconnected events.

Like, the affordability and popularity of the middle class in yesteryear. Sure, this was partially due to latent new deal economic reforms, that were slowly stripped back in the years after, that’s true. But it was also due to a larger managerial class needing to exist, for capitalists, due to a lack of automation. We also can’t really minimize the amount and scale of exploitation that was still going on back then, even to a larger extent than today. Banana republics existed back then, just as they still are kicking around today.

Partially, right, these new deal regulations have been stripped back, that’s true. Partially the middle class has suffered from automation, which has extricated them from their labor, alienating them further, and shrinking their labor pool (programmers are the new managerial class, my man). Partially, it is the case that we are engaging in slightly smaller, or less direct, forms of interventionism.

So there are more reasons why the middle class has shrunk, and some of those, I would say, are kind of good things, some of those are progressions. It’s not to say that things always have to get worse, for them to be, like, equitable, right, which is what I think people are prone to believing in a cynical, idiotic, immoral kind of way. We just don’t walk in a straight line. Humanity walks the path of a total blackout drunk with two bum legs. It’s fits and starts, and there’s tons of piss.

I see this shit on tiktok all the time, where stupid retro flippers take, like, a fridge from the 60’s, and convince everyone it’s the bees knees and the cat’s pajamas so they can sell it to some rich freak for 4,000 bucks. I think, maybe, sure, average build quality is going to be higher than it is in the present, right. But we’re also experiencing survivors’ bias, so the higher quality stuff lasted longer, and we’re experiencing a decrease in value over time with those older products naturally, so you’re going to be able to get a higher quality thing, for maybe cheaper.

Especially if it’s mostly a “solved problem”, like a fridge. Which isn’t even to say that older fridges are solved problems, really. They’re going to have worse thermal coefficients from running all the time, having shitty thermometers, having shittier insulation. It is seen as higher quality because the evaluation of the product is done on almost a purely aesthetic value, rather than in any practical sense. Nobody really needs a fridge that’s capable of holding up to an atomic bomb. That’s a sense of quality that is totally external to the actual practicality of the product itself. It’s an aesthetic tactility.

We’re also going to be seeing shittier products as a result of a shrinking middle class, who’s no longer able to spend as much money on these sorts of luxuries. I dunno how many cool kickstarter gadget projects I’ve seen, that have to kind of, warp themselves in order to be bought up by techbro sensibilities, or else die. To the point where the original project intention often ends up suffering or being in some way misaligned with reality, and the project as a whole becomes shitty. But that’s also maybe just a point you could make about capitalism and society kind of, as a whole.

I dunno. I struggle with it, because I like old cars, they’re very cool. If you’re looking at it right, you can get 50-60 mpg, you can get something that has all your little simple tactile buttons, is easy to work on, and you can get that all for about 10,000+ dollars cheaper than your newer hybrid piece of shit. Which isn’t really something you can buy for cheaper used, since the batteries tend to start crapping out on you after the second owner, you gotta get more lucky to get those for cheap. But then we’re also in a weird transitional period for the used market so ehhhhh. At the same time, a super old car is gonna have worse safety standards, potentially worse reliability and drivability as a daily car. It’s going to have no features. Is it worse, or better? I dunno, it’s just kinda different. Really, I just want a higher quality honda civic vx. Maybe a little smaller, though.

I dunno, in summary. I think uhhh. Every present reality kinda sucks, probably. I will say also, as an addendum, that I think the past exists within the rose-colored stranglehold of the present. These simplified versions of the past that exist only in the mind, that exist apart from the present, with no chain of causality, that is a construct. It is unnatural, and it serves a purpose.

I mean, you don’t need much in the way of safety equipment when your car can only go 60mph if you’re on a downhill, and it feels at all times that the car is going to rattle apart when you’re traveling on the highway or otherwise traveling at higher speeds.

I always thought it would be neat if his super strength also meant very fine control, so he could do stuff like decelerate a plane with his bare hands, even if that’d be equal to an ant catching a paper mache egg filled with lead. Maybe when he catches someone, he manually decelerates each piece of them bit by bit, controlling where the waves of force go until they all cancel out and have zero inertia.

Imagine people in the US electing Trump, then 10 years later writing the same thing.

I mean, I would kinda get that, no? It’s not as though most people in the US voted for trump last time. Not even counting the popular vote thing, right, which is still pretty important, but like, people who didn’t vote for whatever reason, even. Maybe that’s because they’re not exercising their right to democracy or what have you, and so it’s still their fault, idk. I guess you could include the clause of prisoners and former convicts, who aren’t allowed to vote. I guess my broader point is that, seeing as how kind of, horrendously stupid and undemocratic the elections are here in america, especially at the federal level, I would not really expect russia, and the russians to be any better off. I’d actually probably expect them to be much, much worse off, so I don’t think I’d feel comfortable blaming them for their political system.

I also don’t understand why it’s kind of a controversial stance to kind of, empathize with people that are conscripted into a war. I don’t think, really, over ukranians, right, but empathizing with them nonetheless, I don’t see why that’s controversial. It would be like saying that all americans were at fault for vietnam, which is kind of obviously an extremely simplified and even somewhat useless perspective to have, on the historical factors that were leading up to that war. The election processes that went into it, the economic factors, the henry kissinger shit, the public pushback that helped to end it. Certainly I wouldn’t blame the anti-war protestors or the people who voted against the powers that be for the war, they were clearly fighting against it. I don’t hear a lot about any organized grassroots resistance against the ukranian war in russia, I think probably more as a nature of my westernized news consumption, I’d assume, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the case that there was some level of pushback against this war domestically, especially given the history of cross-pollination and cultural exchange between the two regions.

I’m also not sure that like, attributing war crimes and atrocities to a whole population or to the whole of conscripted soldiers is really a great thing to do, that strikes me as kind of xenophobic. I’ve seen that same sort of propaganda spouted about almost every enemy america has faced in the middle east, both true and untrue. Unless their military doctrine or military culture has kind of a demonstrated slant towards those kinds of things, then I feel pretty questionable about it. Those sorts of controversies don’t serve much to sort of, shed actual light on the core problems there, which is that there’s a war happening in the first place. I’m also kind of skeptical that they would serve to galvanize anti-war support, thus, serving to end the war, but I’d be more willing to be convinced of that.

In any case I’m not going to blame the russian people for not having a mass revolution or well organized resistance movement right this moment, and for not overthrowing their government, just as I wouldn’t don’t blame americans for the same thing. I don’t think that’s a particularly unreasonable stance to have, I think it’s realistic.

Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever bought stuff on FB marketplace instead of selling most of my stuff there, but I’ve never really had much of a problem with it. Everyone’s super accommodating, and super nice every time. Especially when their stuff is free, I’ve gotten like 3-4 CRT monitors from there, a sick huge bean bag with the memory foam, an old IKEA tv stand from like the 90’s or early 2000’s. I dunno. If you’re really that nervous, just meet up in a public location, and make sure you’re packing heat, it’s not too bad.

It would still work in a heavily regulated market, yeah, but the thing with georgism is that it tends to be advertised as a kind of one-size-fits-all solution to the housing market, as a highly sought after “single tax” or “perfect tax”. If you look at the historical ties of georgism which I also kind of struggle to remember, I think I remember that being kind of, the thing about it, was that it was aligned with like, the dominant labor parties, but was kind of seen as too moderate and singularly committed of a position.

So, the tax itself is cool, and agreeable, but the georgists as a kind of, party, and georgism as a philosophy built around a singular tax, I’m still not sure about. I’m skeptical of silver-bullet solutions, which is what georgism is often made out to be. It also gives me bad vibes because anytime I hear someone talking so highly about some obscure 19th or 20th century political philosophy, it gives me the same alarm bells as people who want to be rhodesian infantrymen, or people who want to be dengists, or shit like that. I dunno. Henry george was an interesting and prescient dude but he was also in many ways a product of his time, I think. Here’s marx talking about him in a letter I haven’t read, might interest you I guess.

it’s been a while since I’ve heard about it, but iirc LVT generally evaluates and decides on taxes based on proximity to other developments, so undeveloped land or poor density land that is close to more developed housing, is taxed more heavily, while land out in the boonies isn’t taxed very heavily. it’s supposed to incentivize development in more desirable places to live, and naturally eliminate situations in which higher value plots end up getting bought up by rich people for their whims.

at the same time, it’s still a solution that’s ultimately relying on the free market to maximize their profit margins, and that being good for society, it’s just decreasing the relative profit margins for each plot of land through higher taxes. it still retains harmful forms of development, it just, potentially, eliminates them more naturally, compared to explicit bans.