It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.

I think a lot of people need to learn the lesson that the commercial leftism they are responding to from online is completely worthless false politics and they are demeaning their own value by engaging with it. Imagine how you’d mock your grampa if you caught him talking back to Tucker Carlson on television like Tucker can hear him or would change his grift if he could.

That’s you. None of these fake-ass internet leftists are going to change, but they can waste your time, so they do. Cut them loose, forget about them, and start asking the people you talk to in real life if they intend to vote.

Also, I let go of the “fight against fascism” propaganda when Trump pretended to be shot and every nobody clown on my social feeds started whining their nonviolence bullshit. Sorry? I thought these were Nazis? I thought this was rising fascism? If violence is not appropriate, when will it be? Never?

Never!! Says the middle-class progressive with their nose in the air. They’re always able to slip away to another country when things get bad, what about you? They can hold their ruling class beliefs painlessly while the boots fall on your neck, not theirs.

I guess they were just winding me up, huh, and none of it was as important as their sniveling, desperate need for attention at any cost. When push comes anywhere close to shove, I guess you were playing, not a single shot can you bear to see. You made it sound life or death, when it wasn’t, at all. You lied. This election wasn’t that crucial. It’s not “the end of democracy”, or it would make sense to take up arms, like they are in Myanmar. But you lied, and it isn’t that important.

So I’m done letting e-hype decide how much I care about all this, and how important it is.

Judging by the reaction to Trump’s little near-miss, it won’t actually be a big deal if he wins. It will just be another shitty Republican that you’ve been overhyping as the devil for the last ten years, and I fell for it, like a rube.

Don’t get me wrong, I went and voted yesterday, and I intend to keep doing it every time they let me, but the attention farmers don’t get to decide how important anything is, ever again, not for me. I propose you also take a page from my book. More voting, less paying attention to social media.

If people don’t vote, it will be fine, things will be okay, shit will move on. Get offline, find living people to care about, and let these people scream into the void alone.

I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I’m going like a month with this on my phone and haven’t really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn’t miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don’t know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

The thing about that era that nobody seems to remember for some reason is that 4Loko made everyone crazy because there was pseudoephedrine in it. It’s an upper that’s used as a decongestant, but it also makes people feel like they can do 100 pushups easy when they can barely do 5.

The stuff was in everything. It’s WHY “Red Bull gives you wings” and Red Bull has never been the same since it killed some kid who wouldn’t stop chugging Red Bulls at a rave, and they had to take it out. The stuff was legal enough to serve in cans at the gas station, you could buy the hell out of pseudoephedrine products of every kind, even if you weren’t old enough to drink alcohol in the US, it wasn’t really controlled at all, so it was the secret engine behind the Scene Kids, as well.

It was in EVERYTHING. I have a story about being at work with a miserable flu, dragging complete ass and wishing for death, but then lunch came, and I took some TheraFlu that I had, only to spend the rest of the day gacked out of my mind like “let’s get these fuckin NUMBERS bro!” Ridiculous.

Dumb old caffeine doesn’t hold a candle to it. The real reason pseudo was taken away was because all the tweakers were doing kitchen sink bullshit with stolen cough medicine to make crank and then selling that shit to Indiana truckers, it was crack for people who couldn’t get crack. You could already fly off a can of Red Bull, but they had to have more. It was bigger than 4Loko, it was a hell of an era. Motherfuckers were crawling on the roof. Everyone’s mom was flipping off of stuff at the drug store that she innocently enough bought for a cold. It explains a lot about the 1995-2005ish era.

There were a lot of different options on the booze racks next to 4Loko, I’m not sure why people latched onto that one brand so hard, probably because it was cheap, or maybe it was the first of its kind. Red Bull doesn’t have booze in it. But that’s why Red Bull and vodka became a thing, as well, but that drink was a bit too classy to earn the ghetto legend status. For me and my crew, it was Dragon Jooz, which my roommate had to ban from the house. Same shit, though, it was a 4Loko copycat, there were a bunch of them. House parties were nutty for a little while. It was a real obnoxious era for the party people who only smoked weed and had to put up with it.

But the era came to an end. They took the pseudo away from the public. 4Loko and Red Bull both got severe downgrades to “just a bunch of caffeine and maybe booze.” A lot of the 4loko copycats vanished forever without their real star ingredient. TheraFlu is probably just aspirin and dust now, or discontinued. Party’s over. Thank fuck.

The strange part is how the pseudo wiped everyone’s memory somehow. To this day, I still hear people talk about this era like the energy drinks just had a lot of caffeine in them and that’s why things were all crazy. No, bro. No. You are missing the most important Horseman in this apocalypse, come on. I think a lot of people weren’t all that aware of the ingredients in the can of cheap swill they were pounding, so that’s probably why.

Resident Evil 5 x The Internet

I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.

That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.

I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.

Sorry, I haven’t been stealing from Tumblr like I should.

God I love shitty cosplay that still works.

Somebody shakes their head and says something about milk and pizza

He’s a survivor. He had a hunch and started walking casually toward the mountains, never to be seen again.

Please note that the prompt says “queens of England” very clearly, which turns it into a glorified Google image search, so the results are unacceptable trash, and vaguely leftist language about people being angry for the lack of racism are your problem, only. Fuck off, troll.

The real issue is that even with a handholding, direct and easy prompt, the tech cannot simply hand over pictures, even generated ones to avoid copyright issues, that come from easily discovered answers on Wikipedia and who knows how many other credible sources. The lineage of the British Royal Family is all but open-source data - probably is, literally - and your mom can probably name three Queens offhand though she’s Canadian. This thing completely ate shit on an easy, easy prompt.

I don’t know how many times now I’ve seen some YouTuber use “evil Jerome Powell” as a prompt for a thumbnail, and get a clear picture of him complete with devil horns, copyright be damned, so what the f? The AI isn’t this stupid, that means they’re nerfing it and screwing it up. You best believe they’re still selling it, though.

What other results will it comically fuck up, but you don’t have the knowledge to critique? You won’t see the results, either, somebody else will use them to judge your resume; IS using them, now. Fucking lazy hiring managers are going to just plug your name into this thing and ask for a synopsis of your life so they don’t have to work. It will just fill in missing information with lies, and they’ll eat it up. I guess you shot two people a couple of years ago and didn’t know about it. I wonder why you didn’t get the job?

People have been crazy dumb with this AI, meaning young, smart, tech-savvy people with heavy internet backgrounds who should know better than to trust keep treating it like an oracle, because they have some weird blind spot about this technology. Ignorant executives who think math is for slurs are going to make it do everything.

They’re going to use this technology to decide who gets an apartment, who gets arrested, and a bunch of other shit, save your leftism for that.

The stinky back of that poor tiger

The only time I get 10 hours and wake up tired is after a lot of drinking, so maybe you have other issues.

Try out Shreddit, it’s a web app for exactly this. It even lets you filter by post karma so you can keep your hits. I’ve never used it but that’s the name that came up over on Reddit from everyone talking about the announcement.

This announcement is just “oh by the way, the horse is now out of the barn. He left like 10 years ago but this is the announcement.”

Shout out to whoever dismissed the first AI writings with “It’s like a perfect Redditor. Totally confident and completely full of shit, doesn’t even know that it’s lying.”

That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when everyone was already scraping the shit out of the site, at the very least.

Damn I just eat these whole now. I guess it’s all about the presentation.

This show is going to be a huge hit with line cook babydaddies.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if there’s a “This Side Toward Enemy” onesie you can buy.

This type of relationship is pretty common in war. You and the squad end up “in the shit” and now you have all crossed the boundaries of what civilians call “manliness”. You are free, unimpeachable, the manliest thing, a real warrior, a soldier in battle. The things you do now define manliness, you are writing the rules. They can call you whatever, you will reply with the sort of laughter that silences fools.

People die around you. The sound of another man’s voice becomes poetry to you. How much longer will you hear his voice? Who knows, tell him a shitty joke. Sit on his lap for a gag, do whatever. Drink in his presence, press his flesh against yours, be alive together, try to keep him in your memory, tomorrow we all may die. Has anybody seen those pictures of soldiers from the American Civil War all hanging out and mugging for the camera? Acting all “gay” with each other? That’s what war does to men, sometimes, probably not that often, I fear.

Somebody online with a military background once remarked about the safest he’s ever felt, including in civilian life, was when he was in some tent in a war zone with the rest of the platoon, everyone in their sleeping bags, crammed in the tent together like a litter of kittens in a box. Sure, they were in the death zone, for real, but he was warm and snug, surrounded by armed badasses who would come to his aid at once if anything nasty went down. He said he slept like a baby, that he’s never felt that sense of security since, not even safe in bed as a civilian, later.

It means a lot to me that this book, TLOR, was pretty much written by the Great War. Tolkien went to that war, against his own will, compelled by shame campaigns, not even the law, in spite of his own convictions, and he did not have some safe posting at the base, no, he was at the Somme. He saw the worst of it, probably missed death by inches several times, saw mud and blood, was deafened and battered, only to survive at last, coming home as changed as Frodo.

He watched men charge into machine guns like mice into a blender, watched them die of trench foot and the stupid ways war kills you without even glory or honor to show for it, saw that sometimes courage is just hiding in your little hole and not screaming when the tanks roll over. He saw Mordor in person. No man’s land.

Then he came home, and did he write some edgy darkness? No. He wrote this thing, this fantasy, with its message of hope that evil can be vanquished, and that men can be good, yes, even when they seem utterly lost to goodness. This is somehow the lesson that the War to End All Wars had taught him. He had nothing left to prove, so he made a pretty, frivolous thing, for children, but couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help making something bigger than that. He knew how intimate men become with each other under fire, and it ended up in the book.

That is the only thing he wanted to remember, that unexpected love when suffering and death are right on top of you. I wonder who Legolas was to him? Somebody young and beautiful, who deserved to live a thousand years, but didn’t, probably. They shall not grow old.

We shouldn’t need the machine guns coming at us to hug our friends, that’s probably what he wanted the world to know.