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biblenewsprophecy · 6 months

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AP on AI use in election disinformation & PCG on Artificial Intelligence to be used to fight thinking

COGwriter

The Associated Press posted the following:

Election disinformation takes a big leap with AI being used to deceive worldwide

March 14, 2024

Artificial intelligence is supercharging the threat of election disinformation worldwide, making it easy for anyone with a smartphone and a devious imagination to create fake – but convincing – content aimed at fooling voters.

It marks a quantum leap from a few years ago, when creating phony photos, videos or audio clips required teams of people with time, technical skill and money. Now, using free and low-cost generative artificial intelligence services from companies like Google and OpenAI, anyone can create high-quality “deepfakes” with just a simple text prompt.

A wave of AI deepfakes tied to elections in Europe and Asia has coursed through social media for months, serving as a warning for more than 50 countries heading to the polls this year. …

As the U.S. presidential race heats up, FBI Director Christopher Wray recently warned about the growing threat, saying generative AI makes it easy for “foreign adversaries to engage in malign influence.”

Yes, deepfakes and other lies are being pushed. And that is not limited to politics (e.g. see also No, Bob Thiel does not have a new Facebook page–the deepfake is not me).

Computer-generated fakes are something we warned of back in 2021 when the Continuing Church of God (CCOG) put out the following video on our Bible News Prophecy YouTube channel:

youtube

13:27

Lies and Deepfakes

Jesus taught that God’s prophets would be reviled and spoken evil of. He also warned that the devil was a liar that worked to take the word of God away from those who heard it. The Apostle Paul warned that “evil men and seducers would wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived” (2 Timothy 3:13, KJV). He also warned that letters purported from him with false messages were an issue. COG leader Serapion of Antioch denounced a gospel falsely attributed to the Apostle Peter as pseudepigrapha. With the internet, lies can spread faster than before. With technology, like artificial intelligence, can we expect to see deepfakes that will make it look like Christian leaders say or do things that they did not? Do you, “prove all things” so you will not fall from the coming increased deceit? Will YOU hold fast to that which is good or be one who “loves and practices a lie’? Dr. Thiel refers to aspects of modern technology and various scriptures to warn Christians to not be misled by what is coming.

Here is a link to the video: Lies and Deepfakes.

But there are other risks with AI.

PCG posted the following:

March 13, 2024

A well-informed citizenry may be the best defense against tyranny. That is why would-be authoritarians in Washington, D.C., watch, ridicule and fear citizens who do their own research. Fact-checking organizations like Snopes and PolitiFact have supported the government narrative for years, but this censorship-industrial complex is no longer content with “debunking” conservative narratives. They want to prevent people from thinking for themselves—and from learning certain information in the first place.

Newsguard Technologies announced on March 1 that it is now using artificial intelligence algorithms to prevent people from seeing information online that challenges government and corporate media claims about election fraud. This means that any Internet browser using Newsguard Technology will automatically censor information on this topic from sites like the Federalist, Fox News and Wikileaks, while promoting sites like the New York Times. …

The Federalist reported:

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology team the federal government funded to develop AI censorship tools described conservatives, minorities, residents of rural areas, “older adults” and veterans as “uniquely incapable of assessing the veracity of content online,” says the House report.

The report also stated that people who are dedicated to “the Bible or the Constitution” are susceptible to “disinformation” because they “often focused on reading a wide array of primary sources and performing their own synthesis.”

“Performing your own synthesis” means thinking for yourself.

This is the premise accepted by censors in Washington, Silicon Valley, MIT and elsewhere: Ethnic minorities, senior citizens, veterans and people who live in the country are easy to fool because they are minorities, senior citizens, veterans and rural—and Christians are easy to fool because they rely on primary sources and critical thinking. The reasoning, therefore, is that the government censorship-industrial complex must use powerful technologies to censor what those citizens can know. …

The agencies hiring MIT to censor information are politically aligned with Barack Hussein Obama, who once said at a Stanford University Cyber Policy Center symposium that it is important for people to “fight for truth ….” Sounds good, right? Except here’s the rest of that sentence: “… not absolute truth, not a fixed truth, but to fight for what, deep down, we know is more true, is right.”

You read that right.

The man who constantly talks about right-wing misinformation does not even believe “absolute truth” (which common people just call truth) exists. No wonder leftists fear information and hate for people to read primary sources. The fact that the truth is absolute and fixed and can be independently verified directly contradicts what they want to be true.

This is a war between truth and their will. https://www.thetrumpet.com/29176-the-regime-fears-an-educated-citizenry

The Apostle Paul warned:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, …21 … but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, …

26 For this reason God gave them up to vile passions. (Romans 1:18,21-22,26)

That is happening. AI, various algorithms, and shadow-banning often are related to that.

As far as the “censorship-industrial complex” goes, the Continuing Church of God (CCOG) put out the following video on our Bible News Prophecy YouTube channel:

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15:12

666, the Censorship Industrial Complex, and AI

We are seeing more and more censorship, particularly on the internet. Matt Taibi has termed the coordination of this from governments, academia, Big Tech, and “fact checkers,” the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex.’ Is more censorship prophesied to happen? What did the prophet Amos write in the 5th and 8th chapter of his book? What about writings from the Apostle Peter? Is the USA government coercing censorship in violation of the first amendment to its constitution according to federal judges? What about the Digital Services Act from the European Union. Is artificial intelligence (AI) being used? What about for the video game ‘Call of Duty’? Has Google made changes that are against religious speech? Has YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (X), and others in Big Tech been censoring factually accurate information? Is the US government using AI to monitor social media to look for emotions in order to suppress information? What is mal-information? Is a famine of the word of God prophesied to come? Will the 666 Beast and the Antichrist use computers and AI for totalitarian censorship and control?

Here is a link to our video: 666, the Censorship Industrial Complex, and AI.

We are getting closer to that day, with technologies unheard of when God inspired Amos and John to warn what would happen–like computers and AI–that the totalitarian Beast of Revelation will be able use to assist his 666 reign as well as enforce the coming ‘famine of the word’ of God.

And yes, places like the USA are helping to set the stage to make it easier for it to happen with things such as censorship with Artificial Intelligence.

Notice some of what will be coming from a power that will arise in Europe:

15 He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. 16 He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, 17 and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

18 Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666. (Revelation 13:15-18)

The ability to do that did not exist when Jesus had John pen the Revelation. The technology now exists with computers, cameras, cellular telephones, AI, and a willingness of governments to track and censor.

The Bible shows that a European dictator will rise up and be totalitarian (Revelation 13, 17:12-13).

More and more surveillance is happening and more is being proposed. Furthermore, the biblical reality is that 666 control is coming.

In 2023, we did numerous videos about the rise and use of AI:

ChatGPT and 666

Is AI in the Bible?

AI Jesus? Artificial Intelligence God?

666, the Censorship Industrial Complex, and AI

Artificial Intelligence Superhuman Persuasion?

We are getting closer to the time of 666 controls.

Yet, for Philadelphian Christians, we still need to support the Gospel of the Kingdom proclamation and prepare for the short work of Romans 9:28 (see als0 Preparing for the ‘Short Work’ and The Famine of the Word).

Additionally, we realize that Jesus offers a way to escape what is coming for the most faithful (Revelation 3:7-13; see also There is a Place of Safety for the Philadelphians. Why it May Be Near Petra).

Remember to watch, pray, and take proper action. As Jesus said:

34 “But take heed to yourselves, lest your hearts be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness, and cares of this life, and that Day come on you unexpectedly. 35 For it will come as a snare on all those who dwell on the face of the whole earth. 36 Watch therefore, and pray always that you may be counted worthy to escape all these things that will come to pass, and to stand before the Son of Man.” (Luke 21:34-36)

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n-revolution · 3 years

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According to The Guardian these are the 10 Best TV SHOWS OF ALL TIME

10. Atlanta (2016-)

Donald Glover’s foray into dramedy fizzes with pop-culture callbacks, political subtext and dark lols, following underachieving Earn, wannabe rapper cousin Paper Boi and their black millennial peers. Its best episodes are the ones where racial conflict meets all-out weirdness, among them Helen – in which Earn feels thoroughly adrift at a Germanic festival – and Teddy Perkins, the Shining-inspired, Get Out-style tale of Darius’s (Lakeith Stanfield) trip to pick up a piano from a mysterious hermit.

9. Peep Show (2003-15)

The king of 00s sitcoms: formally innovative, with its point-of-view filming and audible inner monologues, and unflinching in how it used that format to be disgustingly honest about diseased male minds. A textbook contrasting duo in careless Jez and cowardly Mark gave writers Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain the platform for greatness, and the quality barely dipped across nine seasons. Peep Show was always, hilariously, an inch over the boundary of good taste.

8. Fleabag (2016-19)

When Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag arrived on stage in London some six years ago, critics had their doubts (one even commented “I doubt if this material will spin off into a long-running radio or television series”). How wrong they were: as well as returning to the stage for a sold-out run this year, Fleabag’s two-series TV run saw Waller-Bridge infuse the nascent sadcom genre with classic British awkwardness, encompassing grief, family breakdown and, of course, Obama-themed masturbation.

7. Game of Thrones (2011-19)

Despite the widespread calls by superfans to rewrite the entire last series, from Daenerys’ descent into madness to Starbucksgate, Game of Thrones remains the biggest show of the century so far. Even Ed Sheeran sitting by a fire singing a ditty about hands of gold can’t irreparably dent its reputation. And it did come up with the goods throughout its eight-year reign: from the thrills and blood spills to the men baked in pies and the best battles ever seen on the small screen, right through to Cleganebowl. Only The Winds of Winter book will spare us all from Westeros withdrawal.

6. The Office (UK) (2001-03)

It didn’t invent the mockumentary, but Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s debut was so stylistically confident it defined swathes of the comedy that followed its 2001 premiere: two decades on, people are still making pale imitations. Its creators haven’t topped it either but with time, their casting decisions look as extraordinary as their scripts. It’s hard to fathom now that Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook and Gervais himself were all then relative unknowns.

5. Breaking Bad (2008-13)

The show that arguably killed off the antihero drama: nothing since has been able to top the depraved descent made by Walter White (a never-better Bryan Cranston), from milquetoast chemistry teacher to meth overlord, and few have dared to try. Yet as grimly engrossing as White’s transformation was, what kept us returning to Vince Gilligan’s low-key epic was Aaron Paul’s performance as his reluctant partner in crime, Jesse Pinkman, whose frayed humanity shone through the moral murk like a beacon.

4. The Thick of It (2005-12)

The craven, idiotic likes of Peter Mannion and Nicola Murray would be paragons of probity and wisdom in today’s parliamentary landscape. But at the time, Armando Iannucci’s scabrous comedy felt like an indictment of everything wrong with the spin and cynicism of British politics. Luckily, it was also hilarious, mainly thanks to the inventive invective of Peter Capaldi’s ferocious “Iago with a BlackBerry” Malcolm Tucker.

3. Mad Men (2007-15)

The sex! The swagger! The suits! Matthew Weiner’s Madison Avenue masterwork went down with all the smooth, smoky allure of one of Don Draper’s copious Old-Fashioneds. But by spanning the entire 60s, showing the mammoth social shifts in an ad agency in minute detail – from the advent of the Pill and second-wave feminism to the rise of hippies and the dropping of LSD – it became more than just the tale of one mystery man and compulsive philanderer come good: it was a meditation on how modern America came to be made, one iconic advert at a time.

2. The Wire (2002-08)

Along with The Sopranos, David Simon and Ed Burns’s Baltimore crime saga showed that small-screen entertainment could be anything it aspired to be: polemical, panoramic, funny, tragic or all of those things at once. Beautifully written and performed, this was both TV as high art and TV wrenched from the soul. To this day, it’s an exemplar of a certain brand of intelligent, ambitious and uncompromising television.

1. The Sopranos (1999-2007)

It is hard to fathom now, but when Tony Soprano first slumped into an armchair in his psychiatrist Dr Melfi’s office, TV was still largely looked down upon. The slogan for the Sopranos’ broadcaster – ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO’ – felt telling in its dismissiveness, as if making a television programme was something to be ashamed about. The Sopranos changed all that.

Text Source: The Guardian

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anotherkindofmindpod · 3 years

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I LOVE your podcast!! Not sure if I'm being presumptuous by making a request, but would you ever consider doing an episode about John's "Paul's the best PR man" quote and then going into all the ways Paul sucks at PR? (Because you're so right, he totally does, LOL!)

When people say that Paul is a "great PR man" I think they really mean one of three things:

1. That Paul TRIES to manage his image, and we can see him trying.

I mean, I absolutely agree with this. But we see him doing it precisely because it's so ham-fisted and he's so bad at it. John, on the other hand, was downright masterful at brand-management. We have a tendency to chalk that up primarily to Yoko, but he was naturally good at it too. John always had massive personal charisma and was a very articulate speaker. He could pontificate eloquently about serious stuff but could also bullshit persuasively on topics he knew very little about. He could've easily run for office or started a cult. Not to mention the fact that John pulled the Jedi mind trick of saying "Paul is the best PR man in the world!" and got everyone to mindlessly repeat it for 50 years- this is testament to how good John is!

Paul, by comparison, is a lightweight chump, out there being nice to people, shaking hands, signing autographs and trusting people to write nice stuff about him. AMATEUR HOUR BY COMPARISON. Paul mentally lives in another era, wherein if you are polite and gracious, the press won't pry and attack you. But that "gentlemen's agreement" evaporated long ago. Paul has tried to pushback on the press a few times, but he (predictably) gets pummeled. So he finds himself on a shitty hamster wheel of his own creation, being professional and kind and decent to people as meanwhile a cult of people who like to be edgy hate him for being "fake." (which of course is every person’s natural, unalienable RIGHT! No one is oppressing you or prohibiting you from hating Paul if this is your desire) In any case, the whole idea that "trying to manage your image" is somehow unethical or fake is... stupid and childish and not even a serious adult conversation. All celebrities do this and have since the beginning of time. Nowadays non-celebrities do it too (via social media)! Next.

2. That Paul is a huge, fake liar who isn't who he says he is!

Again, this is kind of a silly argument. Of course we don't know the "real" Paul. The Real Paul is a flesh-n-blood, powerful man and creative genius who has been in show business for a million years and is therefore rather predictably liked and disliked by many people.

Through the eyes of someone who doesn't like him, he's awful. Through the eyes of someone who does, he's terrific! Of course he is all this shit. John Lennon wasn't the man he projected into the world either.

Also, this smacks of "Paul is dead" conspiracy nonsense.

3. That everything Paul does or says is meant to make him look good!!!!!

I have some bad news. 😱 All celebrities tailor everything they say to make themselves look good. I know! It's tough to realize this. But take a moment to let it sink in.... Everyone is the hero of his own story. We will concede that Paul does sanitize stuff (especially nowadays) to make everyone look good. To criticize him for this in fine (if you somehow feel entitled to know all the dirt about everything), but to pretend it's purely selfish is disingenuous. He strives to make everyone shine in the best possible light, and everyone fucking knows it. Sure, Paul benefits if the Beatles as a group have a nice image. But also he just might love those people? And not want to trash them? In any case, we don’t have an episode planned on this topic, but agree that it would make an interesting one. (It could also make a good episode of One Sweet Dream as Diana is very eloquent on this subject) TL;DR: some fans find Paul's brand of PR repugnant and distasteful and that's fine. Some people find John's brand of "telling it like it is" insincere and tiresome and that's fine, too.

As always, fandom is optional and we don't have to like anyone.

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script-a-world · 4 years

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hi, any advice on timeline and era etc stuff? I have dyscalculia so numbers and measurements are meaningless to me and it’s really difficult to figure out how much time should lapse (on a large scale; time periods, millennia, eras, etc, not stuff like in one persons lifespan) between eras and events, especially in regards to political n social n technological etc changes

Feral: That depends. There isn’t one answer. You’re asking for longer time periods than a generation or a lifetime, but for scale, take what’s happening now. How many calamities, major political events, social trends, and changes in technology (and how we interact with it) have happened in the year 2020? Since the year 2016? Since 2008? Since 2001? How are they grouped together or spaced apart? And these are all working on each other. In the USA where I live, the 9/11 attacks absolutely have a direct causal effect with the politics that led to the 2016 election (actually before that a Supreme Court decision in the 2000 election also had an impact on that result), and the results of the 2016 election impacted how COVID has been handled this year. That’s 20 years, so when we’re looking at longer timeframes, we scale up. We see gaps and groupings and there just isn’t a specific “oh every decade/score/century, these types of events happen.”

To quote a particularly relevant introduction on Wikipedia:

This results in descriptive abstractions that provide convenient terms for periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending to any ‘period’ is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time over the course of history.

To the extent that history is continuous and not generalized, all systems of periodization are more or less arbitrary. Yet without named periods, however clumsy or imprecise, past time would be nothing more than scattered events without a framework to help us understand them.

Eras, of the non-geological or -cosmological sort, or time periods are culturally determined, completely variable in length, and often overlap. For example, the beginning of the Victorian Era, 64 years, (defined by Victoria’s rule of England) of the Anglo-influenced world overlapped with the Antebellum Era, 78 years, (defined by political and social tensions in the lead up to the American Civil War) of the United States, which is also part of the Anglo-influenced world, and then following the end of the Antebellum Era, was the American Civil War, 4 years, and then the Reconstruction Era, 14 years (the first 2 of which are within the Civil War), which are both fully contained within the Victorian Era. Typically, when you are trying to think about eras, think about political rulership, wars, and large scale trends like artistic styles. It may also be helpful to familiarize yourself with the Three-Age System, which can be applied individually on cultures, rather describing trends for the whole world.

What it really comes down to when we think of eras and time periods is almost like a type of pareidolia. People see groupings of like things happening and put this grouping into a bubble of time, which kinda doesn’t actually exist in objective reality and is more or less a group hallucination on a massive scale. It calls to mind what Zeno’s arrow might have actually been trying to describe - not to say that this paradox is infallible, but it’s an interesting thought exercise, especially once you get into the quantum Zeno effect.

Now that I have fully diverged from the question at hand, we’ll get back to it. Let’s look at one technology type and how much time elapses between developments as well as some tie-in technological, social, and political forces that may be acting on the developments or that the developments might be acting on. I’ll also note how this technology traverses the eras of history as I find that looking at one discrete set over time is easier than just trying to look at the big picture. Let’s look at the history of printing.

(With hopes that it will be easier for you to conceptualize, I will use simplified (aka rounded up/down) timeframes written numerically rather than spelled out or via terms like decade or century so at the very least you can compare length of numbers. I’m also going to link as many Wikipedia articles as I can - I like Wikipedia for this because of its incredible cross-indexing and how it strings relevant articles together into a series, often chronologically. If the numbers are still challenging for you, I will summarize without at the end.)

5,520 years ago, the very first form of printing we know about is done with cylinders rolled over wet clay in Sumer in 3500 BCE, the beginning of the Early Bronze Age.

3,700 years later, woodblock printing is developed in China somewhere around 200 CE/AD, just after the end of the Pax Romana in Europe.

700 years later, the next development of printing is movable type, which is developed in China in 1040. 26 years later, on the other side of the world, in 1066 is the Battle of Hastings and the establishment of the Norman Era of rulership in England, in another 20 years, in 1086, the Domesday Book is hand written in 2 volumes: 1 is 764 8”x15” pages, the other 900 8”x11” pages.

400 years later gives us the Gutenburg printing press that is developed in Germany (at the time in the Holy Roman Empire) in 1440. This is during the Renaissance Era; it’s also the Era of Humanism, and often called the Early Modern Period. Martin Luther will write the 95 Theses less than 80 years later and start the Protestant Reformation, largely thanks to the ability for the theses to be easily copied by the printing press and spread quickly.

75 years later we have etching in 1515. 90 years later, the first weekly “true” newspaper, the Relation, begins printing in 1604.

130 years later we have mezzotint in 1642, which is the start of the First English Civil War, which will last for 4 years. Depending on your preference, the Age of Enlightenment either began 5 years before or 40 years later (unless you’re French).

130 years later we have aquatint in 1772. That is right at the beginning of the American Revolution: 2 years after the Boston Massacre; 1 year before the Boston Tea Party; 2 years before the Intolerable Acts and the First Continental Congress; 3 years before Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Speech (which is printed and shared across the colonies), Paul Revere’s Ride, and the Battle of Lexington & Concord; and finally 4 years before Thomas Paine’s Common Sense is published, the signing of the Declaration of Independence (which is printed and shared across the colonies), Nathan Hale’s execution for treason against the Crown, and Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware.

25 years later lithography is developed in 1796; the year prior Napoleon overthrows le Directoire.

40 years later we have chromolithography in 1837, the year Victoria ascends and the first electric/battery powered locomotive is invented.

5 years later is the rotary press in 1843. The First Industrial Revolution is over.

15 years later is the hectograph in 1860. 1 year later, the American Civil War begins.

15 years later is offset printing in 1875. 1 year before, the first commercial typewriter becomes available. 1 year later is Bell and Watson’s first phone call in 1876.

10 years later is hotmetal typing in 1884.

1 year later is the mimeograph in 1885. 2 years later is Black Monday. 5-10 years later the radio is invented.

20 years later is the photostat and rectigraph in 1907.

4 years later is screen printing in 1911. 3 years later WWI begins in 1914.

10 years later is the spirit duplicator in 1923. The Roaring Twenties.

2 years later is dot matrix printing in 1925. 4 years later is the Great Crash.

10 years later is xerography in 1938, the same year as the first digital computer. 1 year later WWII begins in 1939.

2 years later is spark printing in 1940. 1 year later is the Attack on Pearl Harbor.

9 years later is phototypesetting in 1949. The USSR detonates their first atomic bomb.

1 year later is inkjet printing in 1950. Truman orders the development of the hydrogen bomb. Apartheid becomes law in South Africa.

7 years later is dye-sublimation in 1957. 6 years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. gives his “I Have a Dream” Speech.

12 years later is laser printing in 1969, the summer of which is known for very Very.

3 years later is thermal printing in 1972. The break-in at the Watergate Office Building is this same year and 2 years later Nixon resigns.

14 years later is 3D printing in 1986, the year Pixar Animation is founded and the year after the beginning of the Iran-Contra Affair.

1 year later is solid ink printing in 1987. 2 years later is the invention of the World Wide Web, and the internet as we know it.

4 years later is digital printing in 1991, the same year the USSR dissolved. 2 years before, the Berlin Wall fell.

There have been no significant developments in the history of printing since 1991.

So, let’s look at some averages to help us consume this data. Printing has a history of 5,520 years. It took 3,700 years for another development to occur, and then another 700 years after that - in other words, in the first 4,400 years of printing, there were 3 developments, equalling to an average of 1 every 1,470 years. In the 400 years between 1440 and 1843, there were 7 developments (average of 1 every 57 years). In the next 100 years between 1860 and 1957, there were 14 developments (average of 1 every 7 years but with 1 year having 2 developments simultaneously). In the next 22 years between 1969 and 1991, there were 5 developments (average of 1 every 4 years).

While the general trend is that the more a technology develops, the faster it develops, a trend is not the whole picture. Consider: in the 90 years of 1796-1885, there were 6 developments, making the average 1 every 15 years. In the 85 years of 1907-1991, there were 15 developments, making the average 1 every 6 years. There has not been a development in the past 30 years! There hasn’t been this large of a gap since 1837, 180 years ago.

In general, without numbers, what I think we can see here is that sometimes a certain development, like the printing press, can usher in a new era, and sometimes reactions to what else is happening in the world can pressure someone into developing something new, but often times, most times, when you look at just one thing under microscope over time, why that thing is produced in this era but not that era has nothing to do with the eras in question. When we create time periods, we’re generally doing it after the fact. No one living under the rule of the Roman Empire in 100 CE was thinking to themselves, “ah yes, the Pax Romana, when we have peace for 200 years!”

So applying all of this to worldbuilding, I see two methods that you can use together, to create a timeline that makes sense and is useful to your storytelling.

Method the first, arbitrarily create time bubbles of various lengths - I recommend the use of index cards for this. Index card A is 7 years; card B is 150 years; card C is 47 years and so on. Then take big ideas and put those onto your cards; use inspiration from real history. “I want the War of the Roses but condensed into 7 years.” “A Mongolian Empire type expansion happens over 150 years.” “There’s a 47 year Renaissance of fascination with Ancient History.” Then take those cards, lay them out into roughly the order in which you want them to occur, maybe overlap them a little, especially if they are happening in different parts of your world. Remember that time is not actually linear and things do not happen in a linear, narrative manner in the real world, so there can be wild leaps; there can be regressions; and you don’t have to follow real world history here - though you may want to the first time as a helpful exercise. It’s also very unlikely that you will ever have to know exactly how many years are between the eras or what the interstitial eras are.

Method the second, list all the major historical events, inventions, etc that you want/need to have happened. Start with what directly impacts your main characters and plot. “MC’s great-grandfather is humiliatingly defeated in battle, casting a pall of embarrassment across the generations following and ultimately putting the MC in the position that she starts in.” “The first great wizard codifies the 10 Laws of the Important Magical Order that the MC is trying to earn her place in.” Put these in an order that makes sense to you, keeping in mind that it’s not going to be a perfect progression. Again, you don’t need to know how many years there are between each event, but if great-grandpa was the last in a very long line of family members allowed to be in the Important Magical Order, then that IMO had to be founded first, and there would probably be some events between these two.

Then, when you have your two timelines, one of era/time periods and one of events, graft them together. You may have to shift some things to make it work, but consider the “feeling” or theme of the eras and what events make sense in relation to those feelings. Additionally would this event be more suited to happening when the era is new and is finding itself or when the era is solidly on course or is it an event that would completely shatter the illusion of the era and usher in a new one? Does it make sense for your great wizard to be codifying her laws in the expansion of an empire, or during a period of relative peace and prosperity in an established empire, or before empires were a thing in this world and few traveled far from home?

Tex: I’ve found that historically important events are caused for roughly two reasons - one, an invention that others capitalize on for an exponential growth into other inventions/social uses, and two, someone got sick of someone else’s crap and did something about it. Natural disasters will happen with enough frequency to be noted (see: the Little Ice Age, the Black Death, and the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa), although there’s little prediction for them because of the lack of observable build up in activity.

To pull from Feral’s timeline of examples, writing is popularly attributed to being invented in Sumer, 5,520 years ago - it’s our oldest found example, at any rate, though I’ve learned to never say never on archaeological discoveries.

What prompted this invention? Things rarely occur out of the blue, and rarely without interaction from other domains - where could writing have come from? Maybe art? What about from the creation of a tool, a reuse of certain skill sets? Something else we haven’t thought of yet?

So that’s one half of the question. But what about the other half - what did people around the inventor (multiple inventors?) think of this new thing? Deliberately associating a particular sound with a particular object - even a 2D object like pressing shapes into a piece of clay - and then standardizing it, is no mean feat. How did this agreement even happen? Were there arguments about how to do these graphemes, how best to shape them? What about which phoneme to each?

I doubt Sumerian cuneiform was created in a day, and likewise I doubt that language popped into existence on a whim. To keep pulling from this example, language composition has a strong effect on how we interact with our environment (University of Missouri-St Louis Libraries), but it conversely is also deeply affected by the environment its users create (Nature).

Because of this, I think it’s easier to work from a different angle - figure out what your major events are, and what eras you’re covering. If these major events also define an era, that’s even better! Working out how long everything each thing takes is ultimately a bunch of minor details, so it’s up to you how much your plot actively needs them, rather than decoration to your story meant to amuse you more than your audience.

#pylons #time #eras #timelines #Anonymous

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tinyshe · 3 years

Text

Story at-a-glance

In the spring of 2021, the Biden Administration said it was seriously looking into establishing a vaccine passport system that will allow unvaccinated individuals to be legally treated as second-class citizens

In Israel, vaccine certificates are already required for entry into many public spaces. Activists warn it’s become a two-tiered society where the unvaccinated are ostracized

The public narrative is not only building prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks or get an experimental vaccine, but is also using healthy people as scapegoats from the very beginning, blaming the spread of the virus on asymptomatically infected people

With the rollout of vaccine certificates, we are stepping firmly into discrimination territory. The last step will entail persecution of non-vaccinated individuals. At that point, we will have replicated the Nazi regime’s four-step process of dehumanizing the Jews, which ultimately allowed the genocide to occur

Vaccine passports are about creating justification for segregation, discrimination and elimination of certain groups of people, in this case, people who don’t want to be part of the experimental vaccine program, which identifies them as noncompliant with top-down edicts

This article was previously published on April 6, 2021 and has been updated with new information.

As predicted in 2020, vaccine passports are being rolled out across the world, including the U.S. As reported by Ron Paul in his Liberty Report,1,2 which streamed live March 29, 2021, the Biden Administration said it was "seriously looking into establishing some kind of federal vaccine passport system, where Americans who cannot (or will not) prove to the government they have been jabbed with the experimental vaccine will be legally treated as second-class citizens."

While Biden has yet to formally announce such a program, Paul warns that if it happens, this system "will quickly morph into a copy of China's 'social credit' system, where undesirable behaviors are severely punished." I've been saying the same thing for many months now, and there's every reason to suspect that this is indeed where we're headed.

Indeed, listen to Ilana Rachel Daniel's emotional plea from Jerusalem, Israel, where a "Green Pass" is now required if you want to enter any number of public venues and participate in society. Daniel, who emigrated from the U.S. to Israel 25 years ago, is a health adviser, activist and information officer for a new political human rights party called Rappeh.

The COVID-19 data simply don't support the rollout of this kind of draconian measure. In the absence of a serious, truly massively lethal threat to a major portion of U.S. citizens, having to show vaccine papers in order to travel and enter certain social venues is clearly more about imposing top-down government control than safeguarding public health.

We're Looking at the End of Human Liberty in the West

Mandatory vaccine passports will be massively discriminating, and are quite frankly senseless, considering the so-called COVID-19 "vaccines" don't work like vaccines.

They're designed to lessen symptoms when the inoculated person gets infected, but they do not actually prevent them from getting infected in the first place, and they don't prevent the spread of the virus — which is being proven by the number of fully vaccinated people who not only are coming down with the Delta variant of COVID, but are being told they can spread it to others.

With statistics like this, vaccine passports are nothing but loyalty cards, proving you've submitted to being a lab rat for an experimental injection and nothing more, because in reality, vaccinated individuals are no safer than unvaccinated ones. It's a truly mindboggling ruse, and unless enough people are able to see it for what it is, the world will rather literally be turned into a prison planet.

In Israel … we're hearing from activists that it's a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world. ~ Naomi Wolf

As noted by former Clinton adviser and author Naomi Wolf, mandatory COVID-19 passports would spell the "end of human liberty in the West." In a March 28, 2021, interview with Fox News' Steve Hilton, she said:3,4

"'Vaccine passport' sounds like a fine thing if you don't understand what those platforms can do. I'm [the] CEO of a tech company, I understand what these platforms can do. It is not about the vaccine, it's not about the virus, it's about your data.

Once this rolls out, you don't have a choice about being part of the system. What people have to understand is that any other functionality can be loaded onto that platform with no problem at all. It can be merged with your Paypal account, with your digital currency. Microsoft is already talking about merging it with payment plans.

Your network can be sucked up. It geolocates you everywhere you go. You credit history can be included. All of your medical and health history can be included.

This has already happened in Israel, and six months later, we're hearing from activists that it's a two-tiered society and that basically, activists are ostracized and surveilled continually. It is the end of civil society, and they are trying to roll it out around the world.

It is absolutely so much more than a vaccine pass … I cannot stress enough that it has the power to turn off your life, or to turn on your life, to let you engage in society or be marginalized."

Largest Medical Experiment in the History of the World

As noted by Donald Rucker, who led the Trump Administration's health IT office, the individual tracking that goes along with a vaccine passport will also help officials to evaluate the effectiveness and long-term safety of the vaccines. He told The Washington Post:5

"The tracking of vaccinations is not just simply for vaccine passports. The tracking of vaccinations is a broader issue of 'we're giving a novel biologic agent to the entire country,' more or less."

In other words, health officials know full well that this mass vaccination campaign is a roll of the dice. It's the largest medical experiment in the history of the world, and vaccine certificates will allow them to track all of the millions of test subjects. This alone should be cause enough to end all discussions about vaccine mandates, yet the experimental nature of these injections is being completely ignored.

Again, by shaming people who have concerns about participating in a medical experiment and threatening to bar them from society, government officials are proving that this is not for the greater good. It's not about public health. It's about creating loyal subjects — people who are literally willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children at the request of the government, no questions asked.

Vaccinations Are the New 'Purity Test'

Wolf also points out the horrific history of IBM, which developed a similar but less sophisticated system of punch cards that allowed Nazi Germany to create a two-tier society and ultimately facilitated the rounding up of Jews for extermination.

Suffice it to say, some of the most gruesome parts of history are now repeating right before our eyes, and we must not turn away from this ugly truth. Doing so may turn out to be far more lethal than COVID-19 ever was.

The short video above features a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor who compares mask wearing to, as a Jew, having to wear a yellow star to mark their societal status. However, back then, everyone understood what was happening, she says.

At no point were they lied to and told that wearing the star was for their own good, which is what's happening now. So, in that respect, the current situation is far more insidious. She says the "hypocrisy in the public narrative," which claims that we need to wear masks to protect the old, "is absolutely unbearable." "I would love to die in a state [of] freedom," she says, "than live like this."

She adds that at her age, her life expectancy is short, and she would gladly exchange her death for the life and happiness of the next generations. She wants the younger generations to have the freedom "to live their lives, as I have lived mine ... To see people defile their children with masks is something totally unbearable to me," she says. Vaccine credentials, in my view, are even more comparable to the Jewish yellow star, but in reverse.

Not having the certificate will be the yellow star of our day, which will allow business owners, government officials and just about anyone else to treat you like a second-class citizen and deny you access to everything from education, work and travel, to recreation, social engagements and daily commerce — all under the false guise of you being a biological threat to all those who have been vaccinated.

According to the public narrative, vaccine certificates are a key aspect of getting life back to normal, but the reality is the complete converse, as they will usher in a markedly different society that is anything but normal.

Florida Bucks the Trend

As a resident of Florida, I must applaud Gov. Ron DeSantis who announced March 29, 2021,6 that he would issue an executive order forbidding local governments and businesses from requiring vaccine certificates.

He followed up with that order April 2, 2021, saying he was calling on the state legislature to create a measure that will allow him to sign it into law. Unfortunately, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams issued an injunction August 8, 2021, against enforcing the order; whether DeSantis chooses to fight to keep it is yet to be seen.

"It's completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply participate in normal society," he said at the time he announced the order.

But, no matter what comes of DeSantis' order, other states and countries that do decide on such a requirement are also bound to face the problem of black market vaccination certificates, which have already started emerging.7,8

As reported by the Daily Beast,9,10 a number of health care workers have been caught bragging about forging vaccination cards on their social media channels. Apparently, they have not yet realized the public nature of the internet, but that's beside the point.

In Florida, a man working at a web design company was fired after posting a TikTok video advertising fake vaccine cards,11 and in Israel, where the two-tier society is already forming, a man was arrested for making and selling forged COVID-19 vaccination certificates, which are now required for entry into restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, swimming pools and other public venues throughout the country.12

Around the world, people are also being arrested for administering fake vaccines13,14,15,16,17 and selling bogus COVID-19 tests.18,19

Eugenics and Hygiene Obsessions

While it's often considered bad policy to compare anything to the Nazi regime, the comparisons are growing more readily identifiable by the day, which makes them hard to avoid.

Aside from the parallels that can be drawn between mask wearing and/or vaccine "papers" and the Jewish yellow star, there's the Nazi's four-step process for dehumanizing the Jews,20 — prejudice, scapegoating, discrimination and persecution — a process that indoctrinated the German people into agreeing with, or at least going along with the plan to commit genocide.

In present day, the public narrative is not only building prejudice against people who refuse to wear masks or get an experimental vaccine, but is also using healthy people as scapegoats from the very beginning, blaming the spread of the virus on asymptomatically infected people.

With the rollout of vaccine certificates, we are stepping firmly into discrimination territory. The last step will entail persecution of non-vaccinated individuals. This in and of itself also harkens back to the Nazi regime, which was obsessed with "health guidelines" that eventually led to the mass-purging of "unclean" Jews. As reported by Gina Florio in a December 2020 Evie Magazine article:21

"When Hitler first came to power in Nazi Germany, he kicked off a series of public health schemes. He started by setting up health screenings all over the country, sending vans around to every neighborhood to conduct tuberculosis testing, etc.

Next up was factory cleanliness — he launched a robust campaign encouraging factories to completely revamp their space, thoroughly clean every corner … After the factories, the next mission was cleaning up the asylums …

What started as seemingly innocent or well-meaning public health campaigns quickly spiraled into an extermination of races and groups of people who were considered dirty or disgusting. In short, the beginning of Hitler's reign was a constant expansion of who was contaminated and who was impure …

We're seeing an obsession with covering our faces all the time so we don't spread disease or deadly germs; most public places we walk into won't even allow us to enter without slathering our hands in hand sanitizer; and people act terrified of someone who isn't wearing a mask.

Nobody can say with a straight face that this is normal behavior … We're even seeing people advocate for some kind of tracking device to show that a person is vaccinated or 'clean' enough to enter a venue … Let's hope we can all learn the lessons from the past and we don't witness history repeat itself."

History Is Repeating Itself

Indeed, everyone calling for vaccine certificates — which became part of the public narrative early on in the pandemic — is guilty of following in the well-worn footsteps of this infamous dictator, repeating the very same patterns that were universally condemned after the fall of the Third Reich.

Highlighting them all would be too great a task for one article, so two glaring examples will have to suffice. In December 2020, Andrew Yang, an entrepreneurial attorney with political ambitions, tweeted the following:22

"Is there a way for someone to easily show that they have been vaccinated — like a bar code they can download to their phone? There ought to be … Tough to have mass gatherings like concerts or ballgames without either mass adoption of the vaccine or a means of signaling."

Signaling what, if not your "unclean" biohazard state? In his March 2021 Tweet, law professor, political commentator and former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Harry Litman, was more direct about the ill intent behind vaccine certificates, saying:23

"Vaccine passports are a good idea. Among other things, it will single out the still large contingent of people who refuse vaccines, who will be foreclosed from doing a lot of things their peers can do. That should help break the resistance down."

Comments like these demonstrate that vaccine passports are about creating justification for segregation, discrimination and elimination of certain groups of people, in this case, people who don't want to be part of the experimental vaccine program.

The justification is that they're too "unclean," too "unsafe" to freely participate in public society and must therefore be identified and shut out. In reality, it's really about identifying the noncompliant.

During the Nazi reign, those slated for segregation, discrimination and elimination were identified by their affiliation with Judaism (there's controversy as to whether Jewishness is an issue of race, ethnicity, religion, national identity or familial bonds, which you can learn more about on JewInTheCity.com,24 but all were relevant criteria in the Nazi's hunt for Jews).

Today, the global elimination strategy foregoes such identities, and focuses instead on identifying who will go along with the program and who will be a noncompliant troublemaker.

In short, vaccine passports are a device to identify who the loyal subjects of the unelected elite are, and who aren't. Those unwilling to enter the new world of technocratic rule without a fuss are the ones that need to be eliminated, and willingness to be a test subject for an unproven experimental treatment is the litmus test. It's really not more complicated than that.

Are You Ready To Be an Outcast?

This is essentially the conclusion drawn by Mike Whitney as well, detailed in an article25 posted on The Unz Review. I would encourage you to read the entire article as it succinctly summarizes the reasons behind the current censorship.

In his article, he points out that behavioral psychologists have been employed by the government to promote the COVID-19 vaccination campaign and maximize vaccine uptake. They also have a "rapid response team" in place to attack the opinions of those who question the "official narrative."

Mike also highlights a National Institutes of Health report26 titled, "COVID-19 Vaccination Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence," which lays out the intent to turn vaccine refusers into social outcasts as a tool to coerce compliance.

"This is very scary stuff," Whitney writes.27 "Agents of the state now identify critics of the COVID vaccine as their mortal enemies. How did we get here? And how did we get to the point where the government is targeting people who don't agree with them? This is way beyond Orwell. We have entered some creepy alternate universe …

If behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government's strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the 'professionals' who conjured up the pandemic restrictions?

Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by 'experts' as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people?

Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions, the dramatic restructuring of the economy, and the imposition of a new political order? These questions need to be answered …

Vaccination looks to be the defining issue of the next few years at least. And those who resist the edicts of the state will increasingly find themselves on the outside; outcasts in their own country."

Will You Obey?

As detailed in an internet blog titled, "Will You Obey the Criminal Authoritarians?" the 1962 Milgram Experiment (embedded above for your convenience), tested the limits of human obedience to authority, proving most people will simply follow orders, even when those orders go against their own sound judgment. They'll commit atrocious acts of violence against others simply because they were told it's OK by an authority figure.

We've already seen examples of this during the past year's mask mandates. Suddenly, people felt empowered to verbally harass, pepper spray and physically attack others simply for not wearing a mask. Families were kicked off planes because their toddlers wouldn't wear a mask. People were even shot for the grievous "crime" of not wearing a mask.

If those things were allowed to happen over mask wearing, one can only imagine what will be tolerated, if not encouraged, when vaccine certificates take full effect. The most obvious answer is to take a firm stand against devolution into inhumanity, regardless of whether you think COVID-19 vaccinations are a good idea or not. The question is, will you? In many ways, the months and years ahead will test the ethics and humanity of every single one of us.

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mist-the-wannabe-linguist · 3 years

Note

Here are your random numbers to answer whenever you're ready:

1. Question 47 for Character 32

2. Question 23 for Character 13

3. Question 50 for Character 9

4. Question 35 for Character 7

5. Question 43 for Character 36

6. Question 19 for Character 30

7. Question 37 for Character 18

8. Question 20 for Character 29

9. Question 44 for Character 5

I even randomized the number of questions I asked from 5-10 so that's why there are 9 of them lmao

Do they want to project an image of a younger, older, more important person? Do they want to be visible or invisible?

Léo was always the big one. Older and stronger than the other boys in the gang, he liked to have some kind of authority among them, even though there was no official leader and most of the planning was done by Thomas, Léo still had the most experience. And he was always the loudest, the most daring, the most likely to get in trouble and cause trouble, even among the street kids themselves, but despite this he was also the most likely, if not the only one who actually sacrificed himself for them.

What do they want from a partner? What do they think and feel of sex?

Paul is an interesting case, he was never really interested in finding a partner despite his father urging him to marry so he can inherit the family business. He did eventually get engaged to an acquaintance of his, who was equally disinterested. Both kept finding excuses for why they keep delaying their marriage (driving Paul's father insane in the process) but by the time they became quite good friends and thought that perhaps the marriage could even work (not as romantic partners but more like roommates), Paul tragically died. I'm not actually sure why he was this way, I don't think he was aro or ace and I don't believe he was gay either, so I suppose he simply felt it's not for him? Not sure

What are the prevailing facial expressions? Sour? Cheerful? Dominating?

Most of the time Adam's expression is neutral, if somewhat sad. The time period did not provide Victor with very accurate tools so the nerves and small muscles in Adam's face don't exactly allow for facial expressions. When he does try it usually comes off looking unsettling, so he prefers to keep it to a minimum and prefers to express his emotions through his voice and gestures

Do they always rationalize errors? How do they accept disasters and failures?

Justine doesn't strike me as someone who would rationalize errors, she feels like someone who accepts things as they come and tries to use every mistake to her advantage. She considers every bad experience to be valuable and believes that every cloud has a silver lining.

Does your character have any secrets? If so, are they holding them back? Until two days ago Sinitsin did not even have a proper name, so there is not much to his character just yet (I don't even know what he looks like) so if he does have secrets, he's doing a pretty good job at hiding them from us too

What were your character’s deepest disillusions? In life? What are they now? Growing up, Ilse's biggest disillusion was that things are meant to last. She has since learned that the world brings constant change

How is your character’s imagination? Daydreaming a lot? Worried most of the time? Living in memories? When not plotting various shenanigans with his sister Mary, Will's mind is usually preoccupied with animals, be it picking a name for the newest snail he's found in the garden or counting down the days until the migration of geese begins. Often it ends with him losing track of time or missing what others said to him, which concerns both Margaret and Oscar as it has an effect on Will's performance at school.

What were the most deeply impressive political or social, national or international, events that they experienced? The only major event in Norway was the Theatre War in 1788-89 which did not even affect Bergen in any way so apart from about a year of uncertainty and worries about a larger conflict it did not play any significance in Johan's life

How badly do they want to obtain their life objectives? How do they pursue them?

For most of Ernest's life, his main objective was to get stronger, join the army, travel, see the world outside of Geneva, do great deeds, become a hero. He did what he could to achieve that and got so close, but it was not enough. Eventually he would come to realize that it was for the better, after meeting people who have actually went through what he's dreamed of and he sees that the life of a soldier is very different from what he imagined.

After the deaths of everyone and Victor locked up in an asylum, and eventually gone too, Ernest's only goal was to complete university like his father wanted, hanging on to it as the last remaining stability in his life, but he lost even that after a fight that ended with him kicked out.

Now (meaning the beginning of the voyage) with nothing left to lose, his only objective is to find the Creature and bring this story to an end once and for all, whatever that will mean.

#bam #ramble over

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greatfay · 4 years

Note

since ur answering asks and shit can u explain what u meant by generational differences in communication

Damn it’s like 2015 tumblr when my inbox used to be WET. So if you’re talking about the controversial opinions post, YES, like I totally understand where people are coming from when they say that generational divides aren’t real (because they aren’t, they’re arbitrary) and distract us from real problems and yes they paint past generations as collectively bigoted when Civil Rights protestors in the 60s (who are in their 70s and 80s now) are mirrors to BLM protestors today, who could be of any age, but the most vocal and famous (at least online, especially irt to the founders, like Patrisse Cullors who is 37.

But how we communicate is sooooo different. I really point to the Internet and Social Media as a major influence in how younger millennials (more Tom Hollands and less Seth Rogans—see even there, I feel like there are two different types of Millennials) and Gen Zrs/Zoomers and even Generation Alpha behave and communicate. We live in a world where we grew up either knowing right out the gate or discovering the hard way that what we say and do has permanence, the kind of permanence that prior generations have never experienced until today. The dumb things kids have been saying since forever can now follow them... forever. We have an inherent understanding of how online spaces work. Compare that to, idk, let’s say you posted on your Facebook (for the first time in 18 months) “All these big and bad grown ass Senators going after actual child Greta Gerwig lol ok, you’re so brave for attacking a CHILD over climate change” and then your aunt, who’s turning “forty-fifteen” in May replies to your post with “So happy to see my passionate niece! Much love from us, hope you’re doing well. Paul is doing great, waiting on his screening results. Tell your mom I said we miss her, we need to get together, we forgive her for last Christmas.”

Like... ok there’s a lot going on there, but your hypothetical aunt is oversharing on a publicly accessible post. And even with the most strict of privacy settings, she’s oversharing where your other Facebook friends (which may include classmates, coworkers, etc.) can see. But she’s saying things that would only be appropriate in a 1-on-1 conversation. This Aunt doesn’t have an understanding of such boundaries, she’s not as technologically literate and hasn’t grown up in a world of Virtual Space, she still gets most of her news from TV, she trusts what a reporter on Channel 4 will read off a script more than what actual video footage of an incident might reveal on Twitter, and she has no clue that she’s been sharing her location data with every post she makes.

There’s such a huge difference. I think it even affects how we experience and express stress and frustration. I think growing up partially in online spaces has made me more accustomed to conflict and consequence-free arguing than someone who never had to worry about that. I’ve been exposed so much to harassment and bullying, triangulating and echo chambers in forums and threads, and vastly opposing point of views at such an early age that it’s had an effect on how I see the world. Compare this to a customer I helped two weeks ago who was looking for a specific type of supplement for children. I found it for her, I handed her exactly what she was looking for, even though her description of the product actually matched several different products; to make sure I’d done my job thoroughly and that she leaves happy and satisfied and doesn’t bother me again, I then show her more products that match her description so that she knows she has options. And she proceeds to freak out, saying “NO, NO, I’M LOOKING FOR [X] AND IT HAS TO BE [XYZ]” and when I say freak out, she looked stressed and PANICKED. And being a retail employee wears you down bit by bit, and add COVID on top of it and little shit like this makes you snap, sometimes. So I have to cut her off like “Why are you screaming and freaking out, jfc you’re holding what you said you wanted. It’s in your hands. I gave you what you wanted, I’m just showing you more things.”

That customer is not an exception, she’s not a unique case. She’s representative of a frightening percentage of her generation, the kids who watched Grease and The Breakfast Club and Ghost in theaters when they were originally released. This is how they communicate and process information. She could not, for some reason, register that her need had been fulfilled, and defaulted to an extreme emotional response when given new and different information.

I’ve yet to deal with someone younger than 35 act the same way, the exceptions being the kids of very wealthy people at my new job who reek of privilege I gag when they walk in—but even they are like *shrugs* “ok whatever” and understanding when there’s something I can’t do for them.

Me: “sorry, we are totally out of that one in your size, but I can order it for you, it’s 2-3 day shipping at no cost to you and we ship it straight to your house”

A rich, white, attractive 22-year-old who’s had access to organic food, a rigorous dermatologist, and financial security since she was born: “mmm... sure, I’ll order it”

A 47-year-old of any socioeconomic background, of any race, in the same situation: “AHHHHHHHHHHH”

I just think it’s crazy how three generations of kids and young adults raised in a world where everything moves so much faster, where knowledge and entertainment and communication can be gathered so much faster, are often so much more polite and patient and understanding. Yesterday I told an older man (mid-50s) whose native tongue is the same as mine, as clearly and succinct as possible, that what he’s looking for is “in aisle 4.” He proceeded to repeat back, “Aisle 7?” four time before I dropped everything to show him what he needed in aisle 4, despite his insistence that he didn’t need me to walk him there. 4 and 7 sound nothing alike in English. There’s just something going on up there 🧠 that’s different.

Oh, other generational divides!!! We have different approaches to labor and working. Totally different! I’m a “young” millennial where I’m almost Gen Z, and I’ve noticed an awful trend among my demographic where people actually brag about working 90 hour work weeks. Or brag about how they skip breaks and live on-call to get the job done for “the hustle” like this “hustle, become a millionaire by 30″ culture that’s dominated these kids, idk where tf that came from. Like why are you proud of being a wage slave, getting taken advantage of by your millionaire/billionaire overlords. Compare this to my mother’s generation (she’s a borderline Genius X’er, she and her best friend were a year too young to watch Grease when it came out and had a random older woman buy tickets for her; she went to Prince concerts, took photos of him, then sold the photos on buttons at school, that’s her culture and teenage experience), where she’s insistent on her rights and entitlements as an employee, and these things she instilled me: “whatchu mean they didn’t schedule a break for you and you’re working 12 hrs today? oh no, you’re off, don’t answer your phone cuz you are NOT available!” There are Gen X’ers who entered the workforce at a time that America was drifting toward this corporate world, with more strictly defined regulations, roles, and understandings of labor rights (and also, let’s talk about how the 80s there was so much more attention on workplace harassment, misogyny and gender divides in wage gaps, etc. etc... not that much has changed, but at least it was talked about!). There are young people today who are taken advantage of because they aren’t as informed or don’t feel as secure and valuable enough to claim what belongs to them.

At the same time, those generations (Gen X and older) have a different viewpoint of hierarchies in the workplace and respect irt our direct supervisors. That’s how you get this blurring of boundaries between Work Life and one’s Personal Life that leads to common tropes in media written by their generations, where oh no! I’m having my boss over for dinner and the roast beef is still defrosting :O is such a “relatable thing” for them... meanwhile us younger generations are like I don’t even like that you know where I live, and if I see your 2017 Honda Civic pass my place one day, we’re going to have a problem. I think older generations have a different relationship with the word “Respect” than we do. Like, my grandma, who’s turning 87 (?) this year, and the other seniors in my area, they have a different concept of honor and an expectation of professional boundaries that I, and my mom and her generation, just don’t see (so then there’s something in common with Gen X’ers and the rest of us.) My dad grew up in a world where talking and acting like George Bailey and knocking on someone’s door with a big smile could get you a job, a job that could pay for college and rent no problem. My mom grew up in a world that demanded more prestige, where cover letters and references could get you into some cushy jobs if you’re persistent and ballsy enough. And I grew up in a world where potential employers literally don’t see your face when you apply unless they lurk on any social media profiles you have publicly available and they hold all the cards, and you need all those CVs and reference letters just to make minimum wage... so I feel like I am powerless in the face of such employers.

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theheroheart · 4 years

Text

New Years Meme 2020

@arqueete: “This survey is a meme that has been passed around among my friends since back in LJ days. If you want to join in, please consider yourself tagged.”

I used to journal more, and stuff like this is really nice to look back on, because I have terrible memory for life stuff or the passage of time. So here, for future me.

1. What did you do in 2020 that you’d never done before? Uhhhh wear a mask to the grocery store? This was not a groundbreaking year for new experiences.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions and will you make more for next year? I didn't have any. I don't make any. I mean, sometimes I make them in the vague "I want to focus on this in the future", but I'll already have forgotten by March, like I don't really PLAN my life in such a way. I just have goals that aren't tied to specific points in time. You get there when you get there, and you choose what you want to prioritise.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? No, but my brother got married, which was very exciting because he's 40 and has never had a girlfriend who he considered important enough for me to meet. (And my sister-in-law is delightful.)

4. Did anyone close to you die? My (half-)brother's dad died a few weeks ago (cancer), but I didn't really know him, so I wouldn't say he was close to me. I did spend almost a week at my brother's place to be there for him though. And honestly, I kept thinking about how my mom's dead this year, because in a way I'm glad we didn't have to deal with this year together. She already died from respitory failure, had poor impulse control and sense of safety, and I would've been CONSTANTLY worried about her.

5. What countries did you visit? I was gonna go to Malaysia (for my brother's wedding celebration), but that didn't happen. (Flatmates were gonna go to Japan.) So. Yeah. Home country all the way.

6. What would you like to have in 2021 that you lacked in 2020? A driving force to move forward in my life?

7. What date from 2020 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? I don't think... that there is one specific day? I guess the US election? Despite me being Norwegian, it's still fairly historic.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? /stares blankly at the wall I did do some nice art pieces? I coped? I managed to have good times and make friends despite everything else.

9. What was your biggest failure? I dropped out of two classes specifically because I couldn't do remote learning and self-structured study (BECAUSE ADHD YO), even though it wasn't even that HARD subjects, which was very frustrating. It hasn't set my study plan back, thankfully, but it still felt like a waste.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Only mental. And thankfully not as bad as it could've been, but hell yeah there was some strong anxiety in there.

11. What was the best thing you bought? I've bought some great video games this year. Animal Crossing brought 250 hours of fun, Hades brought 100 hours so far. Good investments.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? // 13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Both of these are related to pandemic behavior so I think you can guess.

14. Where did most of your money go? Entertainment? Also, god, I spent so much money on theatre tickets that are now just vouchers for non-specific future performances. I'll get my money's worth eventually, but right now it's hundres of dollars worth just sitting in vouchers. OH, and, digital D&D books.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? I had tickets for Chess. Several tickets, for multiple performances. STILL HAVEN'T SEEN THIS PRODUCTION THOUGH. But they're still doing it so hopefully it will still happen.

16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2020? Not sure I have any specific ones, actually. No iconic music.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you: Last year I was feeling very accomplished. I was challenging myself, had befriended lots of classmates, had gotten through some stuff I was quite proud of managing. This year has been... not that. But on the other hand, I'm not as exhausted from school stuff, and I'm ready to actually go places and try to do things, as opposed to just wanting a month long nap.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? General life maintainance stuff. Not just school work, but like, focus more on money sensibility and try to get on disability, go to the dentist, work with my doctor more... All of that got a little bit just... postponed indefinitely.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Uh, can't think of any notable negative behaviour. It's mostly stuff I didn't do. Like, I had some bad anxiety in the spring, but honestly I think I did an appropriate amount of worrying.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Had my first christmas with my flatmates (whom I love very much), and had my dad over as well. It was very lovely, and socially way less draining than usual.

22. Did you fall in love in 2020? lmao I'm aromantic

23. How many one-night stands? lmao I'm asexual

24. What was your favorite TV program? There were a few this year! Good Omens, The Queen's Gambit, Julie and the Phantoms, Avenue 5. There were more I watched and enjoyed, but I think those stand out the most. Also, does Critical Role count? OH, The Baby Sitters Club! A lot of good stuff.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? Nah. I don't hate a lot of people.

26. What was the best book you read? Don't think I read anything notable this year. Don't read a lot of books, I prefer to consume stories in other media.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Julie and the Phantoms. Not because the music is astounding or anything, but it was very feel-good and fun. Don't think I had a lot of new music.

28. What did you want and get? D&D campaigns? Have gotten really invested in one of them in particular, it's delightful.

29. What was your favorite film of this year? Hmmm. The only one that stands out was The Old Guard. I watch more series than films. 2 hours isn't long enough for me to get properly invested AND satisfied.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 33 and I don't know that I did anything special. I think I just chilled? Flatmates made me a nice breakfast!

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Having the energy for essays/exams, probably. Just feeling like I actually had some accomplishments. OR LIKE. If Norway did like New Zealand and just wiped the virus out.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2020? Pyjamas. Occasionally 'apocalypse chic'.

34. What kept you sane? My flatmates and my dad. Reliable social interaction with people I care about.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Matthew McNulty, which applies to every single year. But this year I started both a gallery website and a discord server for him, so it was a particularly good year for him. (Special mention to Paul Spera, who I finally talked to face-to-face, through Zoom, but still.) Also I'm using 'fancy' platonically.

36. What political issue stirred you the most? Ha aha hah all of them, oh god. BLM, probably, though. That was when I still had the energy to get invested.

37. Who did you miss? So many people. Like, come on. I don't know that it was even specific people so much just... being in a group? Like, my choir gang?

38. Who was the best new person you met? Met a guy I ended up playing a LOT of board games with. We haven't really talked in a few months now tho. And there's a friend I didn't MEET this year, but I really connected with, who's also now my DM, which was really nice.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2020: It's not necessarily new knowledge, but this year has really driven home the need for both community solidarity and governmental support/leadership.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year: I'm alone in my apartment, that means I can do anything / I'm not wearing pants (alone in my apartment - Brian David Gilbert)

Summary: It's been a conflicted year, a lot has felt like it's been on stand-still, but there's still been some good things in there.

#real life maybe #2020 #personal

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stripyhorse23 · 4 years

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TV of 2020

1) I May Destroy You

I May Destroy You might not have been written during the pandemic, but when it arrived in June it felt like the sort of complicated, cathartic show that could have been. Detailing one woman’s experience of rape and its aftermath, Michaela Coel (who wrote every episode) continually found rich narrative avenues in which to explore her characters’ individual experiences of sexual assault and consent. If that makes the series sound concept-driven, it always placed its characters first; the push-and-pull between Arabella, Terry and Kwame is key to the ways in which Coel’s tender, curious writing is able to explore power dynamics within relationships, friendships and hook-ups. Other, lesser shows that are this deliberately open-ended might feel opaque: it’s testament to the show’s confidence of voice that isn’t the case here.

2) Normal People

Like plenty of others, I binged the entire series of Normal People in a weekend, although one of its many pleasures is how Sally Rooney and Alice Birch’s adaptation teases out the episodic nature of the former’s bestseller. From Connell’s early days at university, to a Tuscan holiday turned sour, and an exchange year in Sweden, Normal People was about the ways in which the people we love move in and out of our lives over the years. It wasn’t immune to mis-steps (the show draws something of a crude line between the abuse Marianne suffers at home and what she seeks out in romantic partners), but the sheer emotional heft of the show was undeniable, nowhere less so than Paul Mescal’s floodgate-opening performance in Episode 10.

3) Adult Material

Perhaps one of the year’s most overlooked shows, Adult Material follows Hayley Burrows as she attempts to balance life as the harassed mother-of-three and the twilight years of her career as adult performer Jolene Dollar. The slyly comic edge of the first episode is quickly eroded after Jolene becomes embroiled in the abuse of another actor on-set. A stark portrait of alcohol abuse and loneliness, it’s also a sharp indictment of how little the so-called ‘culture wars’ surrounding pornography are meaningfully impactful on sex workers themselves. Hayley Squires gives the sort of white-hot star performance usually reserved for 90s Hollywood rom-coms, a veneer of frustration and resignation overlaying even her character’s most abrasive moments.

4) Cook, Eat, Repeat

Why not in this interminably shitty year, choose the one show that offered the sort of balm it’s impossible to reverse engineer? Following hot on the heels of a disappointing series of The Great British Bake-Off, Nigella Lawson’s warm, inviting half-hour new series was the televisual equivalent of a long bath and a facemask. Her fish finger bhorta, brown butter colcannon and black pudding meatballs have already made it into this household’s repertoire, but there’s something innately comforting about the luxurious silliness of Nigella that almost transcends criticism. Whether it’s the giddy nonsense of her liquorice box, the ‘did I hear that right’ moment when she revealed her pronunciation of ‘microwave,’ or the seductive self-care of making a creme caramel for one, no other show elicited such pure enjoyment from me this year.

5) I’ll Be Gone In The Dark

The true crime documentary series boom has increasingly leaned into a focus on the victims, from last year’s The Yorkshire Ripper Files to Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich, but none so effectively or compassionately as I’ll Be Gone In The Dark. Less a story about the hunt for the Golden State Killer and more a study of trauma and obsession, the series splices together home footage of the late Michelle McNamara’s investigation with survivor testimony to create a haunting portrait of one man’s legacy of pain. The early episodes are replete with skin-crawling tension, anguish and tears, but the later episodes allow that to fall away, focusing on the mental fortitude necessary for the survivors at its centre and the sense of community fostered by meeting other women like them.

6)The Salisbury Poisonings

I had no interest in watching this BBC limited series initially: the advertising made it look dry, the story itself (the Novichok poisonings of 2018) seemingly devoid of juicy narrative material. That I’ve watched this three times in the space of a year speaks to its robust, urgent filmmaking. Like several other shows on this list, it arrived into the context of a pandemic it couldn’t have foreseen, but watching the rapid, careful response of local government (crucially and deliberately obstructed by Whitehall) to this crisis presented a sort of horribly watchable what-if scenario. What seemed at first blush to be middle-of-the-road programming evolved over three episodes into the sort of spare, quietly terrifying journalistic drama that invites comparison to last year’s Chernobyl.

7) We Are Who We Are

It turns out that Luca Guadagnino’s woozy, seductive style transfers perfectly to television, and despite We Are Who We Are lacking the timelessness that typifies I Am Love or Call Me By Your Name it thrillingly captured the turbulent adolescence of its teenage characters. Equally effervescent and raggedly emotional, the show’s joy always felt hard-won, bumping heads with the often cynical, unreadable motivations of the adult characters. A tender and frank depiction of queer identities within traditionally restrictive environments, it’s also a love letter to young friendship and the lifeline that can provide during our formative years. Spellbinding.

8) Selling Sunset

Perhaps the year’s most impressively constructed reality show, I was slow on the uptake with Netflix’s Selling Sunset only to have it take over my life for a few weeks during the summer. Manufactured reality series are tough to get right, but much like The Hills (surely this show’s biggest influence) Selling Sunset gains a lot of mileage from gaming pre-existing friendships for maximum impact. Christine and Mary’s beleaguered relationship and, obliquely, their respective responses to fame continued to provide wildly watchable fireworks, but the build-up to Chrishell’s separation from husband Justin Hartley was exquisitely handled. Suddenly Davina’s strangely uncharismatic shit-stirrer and Christine’s predictably OTT wedding were forced to take a back seat to something approaching genuinely moving television. Trying to tease out what was real and what wasn’t, and following the ways this all spilled out onto social media, was pure, unmitigated pleasure in a year sorely lacking in just that sort of unfettered escapism.

9) My Brilliant Friend

Two seasons in and there might not be another character on TV that I’m as continually frustrated and fascinated by as Lila, the eponymous ‘brilliant friend’ of the show’s title. Sparingly warm, often cruel, seductive, Season 2 of HBO’s masterful adaptation sees her trapped in a loveless, abusive marriage but as ever it’s her fractured relationship with Lenù that forms the emotional spine of the show. There’s often a strange sort of snobbery around the term ‘prestige drama,’ as if all that money on the screen is a smokescreen for a dearth of anything to say; My Brilliant Friend uses every colour in its paintbox to portray the yawning void that opened up between Lenù and Lila as they entered adulthood, from the lavish, provocative outfits Lila’s adopts after she marries Stefano to Max Richter’s evocative score and the detail poured into the show’s supporting characters. Rewardingly complex.

10) Mrs. America

I laboured over what would take my tenth spot this year since there was so much TV that I loved, and especially this year so much of it felt essential to how I was receiving the world around me. Ultimately, Mrs. America’s mixture of astute political commentary, character-driven writing and host of enjoyable performances tipped the scale in its favour. Cate Blanchett’s all-timer of a performance as Phyllis Schafly understandably received the majority of attention, but Mrs. America gave us so many memorable moments: Sarah Paulson’s Alice ringing the bell at reception whilst high, Uzo Aduba’s Shirley Chisholm speaking to a potentially bugged hotel ventilator, Margo Martindale’s Bella Abzug quietly realising she’s no longer the radical of her youth on a busy New York street. This sort of deft, smart political drama isn’t often this much fun to watch, and what an ending...

11) This Life

An honourable mention to a show made almost twenty-five years ago that nevertheless helped define the year in TV for me. Shows that were once considered part of the zeitgeist can often feel quaint and old-fashioned in retrospect, but Amy Jenkins rambunctious flatshare drama isn’t one of them. Whilst it can sometimes feel like the show’s characters are universally adverse to making even one good decision between them, there’s a compassion and care underpinning This Life that means it never comes across as overly cynical or sneering. There’s also a lot to be said for discovering a performance that you genuinely consider to be one of the best of the decade, and no other character this year frustrated and moved me in the ways that Daniela Nardini’s Anna did. Bonus points for the genuinely chaotic final episode, perhaps one of the best I’ve ever seen.

And FWIW, these are ten performances from shows not on the list above that I loved this year: Marielle Heller in The Queen’s Gambit, Nicholas Hoult in The Great, Sarah Lancashire in Last Tango in Halifax, Poorna Jagannathan in Never Have I Ever, Michael Sheen in Quiz, Imelda Staunton in Talking Heads, Leila Farzad in I Hate Suzie, Alison Pill in Star Trek: Picard, Gillian Anderson in The Crown and Andy Allo in Upload.

And ten episodes of TV that I loved too: ‘Terry and Korvo Steal a Bear’ (Solar Opposites), ‘The Gang Deals With Alternate Reality’ (The Good Fight), ‘Uncle Naseem’ (Ramy), ‘The View From Halfway Down’ (Bojack Horseman), ‘The Vat of Acid Episode’ (Rick and Morty), ‘I Am’ (Lovecraft Country), ‘No Small Parts’ (Star Trek: Lower Decks), Seven-Spotted Ladybug’ (Everything’s Gonna Be Okay), ‘Daytona’ (Cheer), ‘Whenever You’re Ready’ (The Good Place).

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tessatechaitea · 4 years

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Justice Society of America #10 (1993)

Fact: Golden Age heroes didn't have penises.

I was starfished on my bedroom floor tonight staring at the ceiling and thinking about how in my teens and twenties, I could revel in it, thinking, "Who am I? Who will I become? What does life have in store for me?" But a grown ass man doing that simply thinks, "This is it, isn't it?" At least I can lose myself in reading comic books I've already read and which I didn't really enjoy that much the first time. It might sound like a waste of time but it gives my life meaning! The most shallow of meanings, sure. But at least I'm not growing old watching conservative news because I need anything at all to light my passion. I'll say this about Fox News: they understand how old people are so bored they'll watch the dumbest shit and then get mad about it. I know other people who aren't old also watch Fox News. I don't know what the fuck is wrong with them. I guess they have fears and hatreds I hope I'll never truly understand. I just don't understand watching Fox News (or any of the other non-propaganda 24 hour news sites). People do understand there are channels which show programs that make you laugh or feel merry or that simply entertain the other non-lizard parts of your brain, right? How do you pick Fox News when you can watch Sci-fi or Buzzr Comedy Central or the Ru-Paul's Drag Race all day channel? I just realized that the people who watch Fox News basically use Twitter the same way. The majority of my feed are funny people so even when they're discussing politics, it's always entertaining (or fiercely intelligent because witty people are smart. Dumb people think they're witty (see Mike Huckabee)). But when I check out the Twitter feeds of conservatives I know, at best they'll retweet a sports tweet sandwiched between forty retweets of Ben Shapiro and Dinesh Souza. Maybe they think some of the right wing pundits they follow are funny. But calling somebody a mean name or tagging everything "liberal tears" isn't funny. It's the kind of funny that the bully's weasely sidekick guffaws over and then says, "You tell 'em, Jimmy!" Speaking of things bullies would say, it's now time for me to criticize Len Strazewski's Justice Society. Previously, some old fart named Kulak made everybody in the world begin to hate. But they aren't just randomly hating everybody else. They really seem to be bonding over their hatred for the Justice Society of America. Is this story a metaphor about me and my hatred of this comic book? Because that would be a terrible metaphor seeing as how I don't really hate this comic. I wish I did though! I'm old and I need to feel passion! I bet if I hadn't dropped cable eighteen years ago, I'd be addicted to Fox News too! No, I wouldn't be. I'm as liberal as you can be while still making offensive jokes. So not really that liberal, I guess? Maybe I'm socially, economically, and politically liberal. But I'm a complete asshole when it comes to punchlines. Don't get me wrong! I don't make offensive jokes at the expense of people different than me. I make offensive jokes about myself and those Goddamned fucking babies. Fuck those parasitic monsters. This issue begins with Starman finally reappearing.

It really wasn't exciting enough for an announcement of his return. He's just another half-balding old guy. But it lets me talk about the DC Universe show, Stargirl!

I decided to watch Stargirl because what else am I going to do with my life? Finish reading Gravity's Rainbow? I mean, I am going to do that now that I'm done re-reading those awful Lando Calrissian books. But I can't spend all of time reading Pynchon! Just too much of it! I mean, I'm only 18 pages into Gravity's Rainbow (which is further than I've ever gotten on my previous three attempts!) and I'd estimate I don't understand 5% of the words he's used. And that's me being an English Lit major who has been a voracious reader his entire 48 years (minus the ones where I couldn't read yet. Like ten or something?). I was in bed reading and didn't have a dictionary at hand so I just powered through. But I think I need to go back through and learn all of those words so I can impress the local Starbucks barista! Or are people not impressed when you use a word they have nearly zero chance of knowing and don't know you enough to keep the conversation going by asking you what that means and instead just smile and nod and glance occasionally at the tip jar? Anyway, so I've watched three episodes so far and I'll tell you how I feel about it after I mention how I've actually watched four episodes. The first episode I watched, I was impressed with because Courtney was already palling around with a bunch of legacy JSA members and the Injustice Society was trying to tackle the "Who is Stargirl?" problem and I watched it thinking, "This is really impressive how they decided to start in the middle of the story like this. I like it!" Then I went to watch episode two and I was confused because it didn't seem to follow after the previous episode. So I kept thinking, "Maybe this is a flashback?" And then eighteen minutes into it, I thought, "Maybe I didn't watch the pilot episode. I'd better check." And I started watching the first episode which I totally hadn't seen. So I guess I started with Episode 7 or something. Here are some of my tweet-thoughts on the show for those who don't follow me on Twitter (why don't you follow me on twitter? What is wrong with you? Is it because you don't know I'm @GrunionGuy?): Tweet #1: "Sometimes you think maybe you're having inappropriate thoughts but then you check to make sure the actress playing a fifteen year old Stargirl is actually 21 and then you breathe a sigh of relief and think, 'I won't be cancelled today! Unless I tweet this experience, probably.'" Tweet #2: "Sometimes you think maybe you're having inappropriate thoughts but then remember it's okay to fuck a car that's been converted into a giant robot with Luke Wilson inside of it." Tweet #3: "3rd episode of Stargirl begins with a dying white woman's final wish to her white husband that he make the world safe for their white son. She dies and he goes out into the enormous hedge maze garden of his mansion to scream into the sky about the injustice of it all. All in all, a pretty good villain origin!" That third tweet was the only one that really makes any sort of socially acceptable commentary on the show. Saying things like "Stargirl's butt doesn't look like my mouth should be inside of it because she's fifteen although the actress is twenty-one so maybe it actually does look like that?" aren't the greatest things to admit even if you're just joking (which I am but just adding this statement makes it sound like I'm not but I totally am (that "totally" doesn't help but I assure you, I'm joking (did the hole just get deeper?))). I mean, sure, her body is super fit because she's a super hero (or will be?). But she has such a baby face! And even at twenty-one, she's just a baby! If I were younger, I'd totally have a crush on her. But I'm 48 and I just don't consider young women proper targets for my sexual deviance anymore. The only interaction I should have with young women these days is warning them against going out to the summer camp at the lake where that boy drowned so many years ago. The girls I had a crush on when I was younger (Christina Applegate (Kelly Bundy), Winona Ryder (Veronica Sawyer), and Stacie Mistysyn (Caitlin Ryan)), I have even more of a crush on now. Judging by the crushes I've had my whole life and not society's stereotype of women, women definitely get better looking as they get older. And probably as I get older. I'm sure that's part of it although I like to think that fifteen year old me would still look at these nearly fifty (or maybe fifty? I'm not so obsessed I know their ages but they're all around my age anyway) year old women and think, "Holy fuck mommy." I'm sorry for that last comment. But I'm only sorry to God not anybody who was reading this. Oh, I forgot to mention that Joel McHale is the original Starman (I mean original in the show although he's Sylvester Pemberton who was never Starman but only Skyman although in the show he was at one point the Star-Spangled Kid and Luke Wilson does mention Ted Knight at some point). And he's funny in his death scene just like he should be because I've obviously decides Sylvester is Jeff Winger's new superhero secret identity alias. Starman heads off with his Cosmic Buttplug to stop Kulak in Gotham City. He doesn't know it yet but the rest of his pals are currently battling Kulak and probably losing. Although Kulak is even older than they are so maybe it's a fair fight. I'm just surprised that a comic book where old men battle other old men has made it ten issues.

I think some editor was fired last issue and the new editor's only job was to make sure it didn't look like Thunderbolt had been speared through the asshole.

Although this editor seemed to think it was okay to have Hawkgirl fucked from behind by Kulak.

I hope this isn't a terrible conservative take on women that exposes how terrible I am at sex but even mind-controlled, I can't imagine licking a woman's shoulder would elicit that response. Although she could be "Ummming" from his pee-hee in her bee-boo.

I know conservative talking points are generally fucking idiotic but Ben Shapiro somehow thinking women can get "too wet" from sexual excitement might be the most hilariously idiotic. I don't think I've been with a woman who was all, "Yes! Yes! Lick my shoulder blade!" and I then I got super into it and then suddenly she was all, "Nope. Too wet. This isn't working for me anymore. I need a doctor, I guess?" Who am I kidding? I know I've never been with a woman who did that because that would mean I've had to have been with a woman! Also, women get wet down there? What's that about? Is it because the vagina cries at the sight of the penis? Kulak takes away all of their super powers but I guess he forgets that Wildcat doesn't have any so I'm hoping Wildcat just punches him in the face soon. Although that Starman bit probably was a hint at how the coming fight might end. You know, with Starman shoving his Cosmic Buttplug into Kulak's third eye, if you know what I'm saying. You probably do because I called it a Cosmic Buttplug. I should try to be more subtle. Kulak's entire purpose is to get revenge on the Justice Society for defeating him way back in 1940. Can't even one super villain just accept defeat and move on with their lives? Or are writers just always going to be so inherently lazy that they'll never give up the crutch of the villain attacking the hero directly out of revenge for that one single time they tried to actually commit a crime and were stopped? The JSA puts up a fight that helps to drain Kulak's power but it isn't until Starman arrives and does that thing I mentioned with his Cosmic Buttplug that Kulak is defeated.

This is the grossest orgasm I've ever seen and my computer is riddled with viruses from all of the previous ones I've watched.

After Kulak's defeat, Jesse Quick wraps up the issue with her super hero dissertation which is less a dissertation and more of a thorough cleaning of all of their asses with her tongue. She's all, "I didn't really do much research or define heroes too good but the Justice Society of America are my heroes so I deserver a degree, right?" Justice Society of America #10 Rating: B. This comic book was as average as they get. I suppose that should garner a C grade but a B grade just seems to say decent but mediocre. By the time I get down to a C grade, I feel like the comic book needs a lot more faults than "I don't really care about stories with heroes who are having strokes during the battles." It's a valid criticism but it's probably too subjective for a critical review. I know, I know! When has that ever stopped me before? Well, I feel charitable today. It probably has something to do with Mars being so close to the full moon earlier this week. My blood is all riled up and wacky!

#Justice Society of America #Stargirl #JSA #Len Strazewski #Mike Parobeck #Mike Machlan

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lovemesomesurveys · 4 years

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5,000 questions survey series–part forty-two

These surveys always take me so long to get through, hence why I took such a long break from them. The questions are just too much at times and some are just plain annoying. But, I’ll try and finish it eventually. A couple of you have been taking it lately, so I figured I’d start up again.

4001. How would you rate your sex drive? It’s been non-existent the past few years, honestly. 4002. You are sitting alone with a stack of videos and a vcr. Of the following which are you most likely to puut on (1 is most, 10 is least) I’m just gonna bold which one I’d likely watch out of all of ‘em...

The good the bad and the ugly, dracula, slc punk, twin peaks fire walk with me, jerry springer too hot for tv, singing in the rain, flash gordon, the matrix, blade runner, the muppet movie 4003. Are you more likley to get or send random instant messages? I receive nice messages more often than I receive random ones. I got a rude one recently; however, about how I’m still a 31 year old virgin. Does it affect their life? No. So, don’t worry about it. *eye roll* I do get a lot of random comments on my surveys from su*ar da**ies, though... super annoying. 4004. If you were writing an ad telling people to come to your town what would you say about it? I wouldn’t write such an ad. My town sucks. 4005. What part of your body can you not stand to get an itch on? One that’s hard to reach.

4006. How many people do you suppose have stolen that System of a Down album called 'steal this album'? I haven’t heard anything about that, I’m not even familiar with that album of theirs. I’m there were people who tried/did. 4007. Name a band you like: Linkin Park. What are/were this band's roots and influences? Zeppelin, Run DMC, Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, Depeche Mode. 4008. would you rather have a poster of john lennon or a cute fuzzy black cat? Cute fuzzy black cat. 4009. make a public service announcement: Wear a mask! 4010. What makes you feel the need to escape? Just the need for a change of scenery and to help take my mind off things a bit for a little while. I’m sad I couldn’t go to the beach at all this summer because that’s my one place where I’m able to relax at all and just zone out. 4011. You and your signifigant other, crush, interest etc...who is the ernie and who is the bert? I don’t have any of those. 4012. When was the last time you did something and later asked yourself 'did I do the right thing?'? I hate when I forget if I took my medicine or not. I end up taking it, questioning and hoping that I didn’t already take it. I feel so robotic at times and like I’m just living life on autopilot, so things like that tend to happen. 4013. What do you find it hard to say goodbye to? I have a hard time getting rid of things because of my emotional attachment to them. 4014. What is your fantasy valentine's day like? I’ll admit it, it would be nice to experience a Valentine’s Day with someone and actually do something. It’s always been just another day for me. 4015. If you had to have a color for a name, what color would it be? Jade. 4016. Should preference be given to minority students during the college admission process? I think everyone should have the same opportunity. 4017. Sweet wine, fresh crisp appples, bagles with creme cheese and lox...what is the most incredibly luxurious food? I don’t know about those options, but if I were to think of luxurious foods I’d think of like expensive wine, cheeses, fresh fruits, and seafood like caviar and lobster and whatnot. I’m picky so I personally don’t care for fancy foods. 4018. Is there really anything to fear in communism? I don’t know enough about communism and socialism and all that to speak on it. 4019. Best sesame street character: Uhh, Big Bird. most annoying sesame street character: Elmo can be a little annoying sometimes. 4020. feast or famine? I don’t need to overindulge and have excess, I just would like to be able to have food. 4021. Write a poem right here in five minutes or less: Nah. 4022. Do you stay and help clean up after a party? I usually was one to leave early. 4023. Why was the teddy bear named after teddy roosevelt? His name was Theodore, Teddy for short, and apparently while out on a hunting trip he refused to kill a bear and someone dedicated a bear stuffed animal to him and called it Teddy’s Bear. Then it was just called a teddy bear and the rest was history. 4024. What are you the prince or princess of? Uhhh. 4025. Some people think that Christmas should be taken off of public school calanders because it is politically incorrect. What aould you say to this? I say no. It can still be winter break for those who don’t celebrate. 4026. Would you rather go to an excorcism or a step aerobics class? Uh, I think an aerobics class sounds a lot better than an exorcism. I wouldn’t be able to participate in a step aerobics class, though. I’d have to do something else. 4027. Do you believe in spells and curses? No. 4028. What tv show does your family watch together? There isn’t really one all 4 of us watch, but there’s several that 2 or 3 of us watch together. I guess Family Guy or American Dad could be one all 4 of us could watch, although I don’t really care for either one much. 4029. What's on your calander this year? Nothing. 4030. Is anything ruining your life? It has felt that way with my health issues. 4031. How was life meant to be lived? “We were meant to live for so much moreeee.” 🎶

4032. What is your usual breakfast? I rarely have breakfast, but I like breakfast foods like eggs and hash browns. And country gravy, yum. 4033. If you had kids, would you worry about what they did online? Of course. 4034. Will you be maxin and relaxin this weekend? Sure. If not, what are your weekened plans? 4035. Who has the most interesting story to tell: someone who used to fly to asia as a drug trader the ceo of Nike a nyc homeless person a preacher's wife

^^^They all would. 4036. What do you have a bad feeling about? The future regarding this virus. 4037. Do you have a lot to say? No. 4038. If a smallpox vaccine was offered to you, would you take it? Wasn’t that one of the ones given as a baby or child? I should mention I live in the US. 4039. Would you ever work at a kissing booth? No. how about a dunking booth? No. 4040. There is a woman who paints by stripping naked, rolling around in paint and then pressing her body against the canvas. What do you think of her art? I’ve never seen it, but hey do your thing. 4041. Have you ever bought something you saw on tv? Yeah, I mean that’s what commercials are intended to do. However, I’ve never called the number for a product advertisement to order something that way. Like those as seen on TV products. There have been some of those products sold in actual stores, though, that I’ve got like the Snuggie and that Finishing Touch Flawless Razor. 4042. Name a relative: that relative dies unexpectedly. On the same day 9/11 happens. You can either bring back your relative or bring back 1/2 the people who dies on 9/11. What do you do? I don’t like these type of questions. 4043. Have you gone mental? I’ve definitely felt like that. 4044. What do you think of jews for jesus? You word this like it’s the name of a group or something. Okay, so I Googled it and see that it’s an organization. 4045. Has anyone ever tried to 'save' you? Yes. 4046. Quick! picture santa clause in your head... ...Okay. Was he black or white when you pictured him? White. That’s just how I’ve often seen him portrayed. 4047. Would you ever buy a black santa clause? Sure. Santa isn’t real, you can make him look any way you want. 4048. or take your kids to vist a black santa clause? Yeah? why or why not? Santa is Santa. 4049. What do you smell like? I just smell my clothes laundry detergent scent. 4050. What kind of soup do you eat? I’m a ramen girl all the way. 4051. What have you heard about the next Harry Potter book? Will you pre-order it? I know this is old, but I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books. 4052. Would you rather go out or stay in? I’m a hermit crab. 4053. What's your favorite song to hear on halloween? I like the classics like Monster Mash. Oh, and the Halloween movie theme music for spooky vibes. 4054. What song makes you feel all tingly like you want to laugh and scream and cry? Uhh I don’t feel that way about any song. 4055. If you were starting a website that was not about you, what Would it be about? Nah. 4056. Do you ever take the long way just for fun? I don’t drive. 4057. '..and god said let there be ____and there I was.' Fill in the blank, as if if you were talking about yourself. ‘...and God said let there be Stephanie and there I was.’ 4058. What do you think of when you hear the word 'mill'? A million. 4059. What do you think of when you hear the name: weird al? Parodies. bob dylan? Music. michael jackson? Moon dance. henry rollins? billy idol? White wedding. gary numan? will smith? Fresh Prince of Bel Air. paul mcartney? Black Bird. alice cooper? Rock and roll. J Lo? Jenny from the Block. 4060. What is one social disater you have had? It was really embarrassing getting sick in front of everyone at my party 7 years ago aka the last time I drank alcohol. I just threw up on myself in front of everyone and sat there and my friend had to help clean me up. What really messes me up is that I don’t remember drinking that much, so I don’t know how I got so drunk. 4061. Can you moonwalk? No. 4062. If a presidential candidate went on late night tv, picked up a guitar and rocked out on it and could really play, would that influence you to like/respect them more? I’d probably be like wow that’s cool, but no I wouldn’t let that influence my vote. Them being able to play an instrument doesn’t say shit about their policies or whether they’d make a good fit for the job. 4064. If it was possible for people to instantly change from one sex to another, would everyone be straight in the end? Uhh just cause they could switch their gender it doesn’t change their brain/sexual preference. Would you change your sex? No. 4065. Finish the sentance: nobody broke your heart, if you're alone... I don’t know. 4066. Would you rather have a best friend OR a boyfriend/girlfriend on a Friday night? I’d rather stay at home and do my own thing, ha. 4067. Would a woman rather be complimented about her intelligence OR her looks? Depends on the individual. 4068. Do you tend to think of the right thing to say after the moment is gone? Always. Super annoying. 4069. Would you rather a potential mate have nice hair OR nice legs? Nice hair out of the two. 4070. Okay,…. nice hair OR a nice rack/bulge? I don’t look for a “nice bulge” when I look at guys. 4071. What is one thing you thought you would enjoy, but actually didn’t? Hmm. I’m blanking at the moment. 4072. Be in the spotlight OR in the shadows? In the shadows. 4073. What is your favorite part of the newspaper? I haven’t read a newspaper in several years. When I was a kid I loved the comics, though. 4074. What in your life has been an “acquired taste” for you? Alcohol. I never really cared for it, honestly. I drank because my friends were and felt like that’s what people in their early 20s liked to do. And because it was fun sometimes, though I more often just felt like crap. It’s been 7 years since I last drank and I truly haven’t missed it. 4075. Do you find sunlight makes you happier? No. 4076. If you could conquer one fear, it would be...? I’d take care of some health related things. 4077. What's the dumbest thing you've ever seen someone do or heard anyone has done? There’s been a lot of things. 4078. How do you feel about the fact that J-Lo earns 37 million dollars a year? Is that actually true? This survey is also like a decade or so old. Do you buy anything that contributes to her salary? I haven’t bought any JLO related in several years. Is J Lo the ultimate ideal of what a woman should be? To some people. 4079. What is unforgettable beauty? I don’t know. 4080. Worst fashion mistake EVER: I don’t know or care. 4081. What is your advice to someone on their first date? Ha, I’m definitely not one to ask for dating advice. 4082. Is there a musical performer more ridiculous than Avril Lavigne (I don't think there is)? I didn’t think she was ridiculous. 4083. What is the best: daytime talk show? Dr. Phil. late night talk show? I don’t watch any anymore. 4084. Are you afraid of total freedom? What would that mean? 4085. Do you live in an invisible prison? I feel that way with my mind and health. 4086. Who do you feel distant from, that you used to be close to? I’m not close to anyone anymore outside of my immediate family. 4087. Rate the following song lyrics (1 = you like it the most, 9 = you like it the least). Nah, I really hate the rating questions. Maybe you shouldn't care/throw away those dreams/& dare Eden lets me in/I find the seeds of love/And climb upon the highwire/I kiss and tell all my fears I know the pressure is on/In a race for the life of endless love/If it seems to much/Remember/All these things are endless I see the wind, oh I see the trees/Everything is clear in my heart/I see the clouds, oh I see the sky/Everything is clear in our world Inflatable doll/Lover ungrateful/I blew up your body/But you blew my mind Well I jumped into the river/too many times to make it home/I'm out here on my own/drifting all alone/and if it doesn't show/ give it time/to read between the lines The very thought of you makes/My heart sing/Like an April breeze/On the wings of spring/And you appear in all your splendor/My one and only love now I've had lots of girls/most of them from other worlds/but lookin through the galaxey/the valley girls are the ones for me I'm the dandy highwayman so sick of easy fashion/the clumsy boots, peek-a-boo roots that people think so dashing/so what's the point of robbery when nothing is worth taking?/it's kind of tough to tell a scruff the big mistake he's making 4088. Can you name any of the nine bands/songs above? I didn’t even read any of the lyrics. 4089. What would your reaction be if a total stranger called to say s/he loved you and told you that you were to pass the message on to others in a telephone call you make yourself? Uh, I wouldn’t answer a call from a total stranger first of all and even if I actually did, I would be like wtf and hang up. 4090. Would you like to take a journey to jupiter? No. I have no desire to take any trip to outer space. 4091. Can you crack nuts in your bare hands? I’ve never tried, but I’m going to assume that I couldn’t. 4092. Do you take walks at night? No. Or ever. 4093. Beavis and Butthead or daria? Neither. 4094. Cow or chicken? Chicken. 4095. Do you think you will visit China in this life? I don’t see that happening, but who knows. 4096. Are you having a happy day? No. 4097. When was or will be your 'golden birthday' (when your age is the same as your birthdate, like turning 17 on the 17th)? My golden birthday was 3 years ago. 4098. Enlighten everyone with something profound: Nah. 4099. When has the third time been the charm for you? Hmm. 4100. What is kinda sick, but fun? Uhhh.

#personal #text #survey #surveys #5000 question survey

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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Is America’s Second Corona Wave a Political Hoax? For several weeks, just as most states across the United States began to reopen, following three months of lockdown to “flatten the curve”, several states including Texas and Florida began reporting record new numbers who tested positive for the coronavirus. At least that is what the world is being told. More careful investigation suggests what is unfolding as a huge manipulation of coronavirus tests that includes collusion by the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the same CDC who badly bungled initial rollout of the virus tests in March by distributing tests that were found to contain traces of the virus and other serious defects. The present scandal bears the earmarks of more than mismanagement. It looks like political collusion to influence the November election and far more. It seems that today something is very, very rotten in the State of Texas. The same for Florida, California, Arizona and many other states who just after reopening, now have again imposed lockdown and the foolish and ineffective mask-wearing and social distancing. Yet if we look at the actual data for deaths attributed to the coronavirus, since around the middle of April, the daily deaths designated of COVID-19, whether “with” or “of”, has steadily dropped to a level some 90% below the peak. Even the highly corrupt CDC has had to admit “Nationally, levels of influenza-like illness (ILI) are low overall…Changes in indicators that track COVID-19-like illness (CLI) and laboratory confirmed SARS-CoV-2 were inconsistent during the most recent week, with some increasing but others decreasing.” Then the weekly CDC report updated 17 July, makes the following statement: “Based on death certificate data, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 (PIC) decreased from 8.1% during week 27 to 6.4% during week 28, representing the twelfth week of a declining percentage of deaths due to PIC… Nationally, ILI activity remains below baseline for the thirteenth week but has increased for 5 weeks now.” Note the language very closely. The CDC defines ILI as “Influenza-like Illness.” So are we talking about tests for presence of a specific virus, SARS COV-2, that is blamed for the Wuhan outbreak that apparently has spread globally since the beginning of 2020? Or is it “influenza-like” illnesses, a catchall which may or may not include the coronavirus? The CDC has cleverly lumped deaths whether from pneumonia, influenza or COVID-19 into one neat basket of death cause they call PIC– Pneumonia, Influenza or COVID-19. All PIC deaths are now conveniently designated as COVID-19 per CDC instructions on a death certificate. Even with this sly sleight of hand, the CDC cannot hide the fact that all PIC deaths across the USA have declined for twelve weeks now. How to keep the nation in a state of fear and lockdown longer and how to satisfy the agenda of unscrupulous Democrats who seem willing to do everything to weaken the economy to force defeat of the Republican Presidential candidate on November 3? A ‘Cases Pandemic’? The response has been a dramatic ramping up of the number of tests on citizens for coronavirus or more precisely for an indirect test of antibodies or other signs that may or may not indicate a person has SARS COV-2. Around the middle of June as most states were rightly opening up to more normal conditions, the CDC pushed for a massive increase in testing. Naturally a dramatic increase of those tested will give an increasing number of persons who also test positive for indications of coronavirus. Just as Trump and many state governors were sensibly advocating steps to reopen, the CDC began pushing for a dramatic increase in tests. Testing went from about 150,000 to more than 700,000 per day. Reuters reported that many of the CDC-approved tests were contaminated as well. Now the case of Texas is exemplary of what seems to be going on. According to officials in Texas in contact with former US Congressman Ron Paul, himself a medical doctor, the Texas State Department of Health Services changed the definition of what constitutes a “Covid case” in mid-May when cases were in significant decline. The new definition states, “while previously the determination of a Covid “case” was a confirmed test result, the definition was suddenly changed to count “probable” cases as “cases.” At the same time, the threshold for determining “probable” was lowered to a ridiculous level.” Basically if you have a fever and headache, even without a corona test, you can be listed as a “probable COVID-19 patient.” It gets worse. Based on possibly unrelated subjective criteria, up to 15 people in possible contact with that “probable” case were also listed as “probable cases.” And “probable cases” were considered cases. Presto! Texas is in panic and mandatory masks and other draconian measures imposed. Further, the Texas health officials added to the fears by reporting hospitals in the state were being flooded by corona patients. Yet when contacted, Houston hospital directors themselves, said they were nowhere near actual capacity and in fact were about the same level as they were last year. Texas has a Republican Governor and is a critical state for Trump in November. Florida Too… In Florida where the Republican Governor came under heavy media attack for allowing the beaches to open and other steps, as cases there were dramatically down in “The Sunshine State,” the recent spike in corona “positive” cases is equally suspicious. A local Florida TV station became alerted when they saw a breakdown of lab tests many of which showed that 100% of all tests were “positive.” The TV station contacted test labs across the state. What they found was eye-opening. TV reporter Charles Billi noted, “We found numerous labs that are only reporting positive test results, so they show a 100-percent positivity rate. That got our attention.” They located twenty-two labs that reported 100-percent positivity rates. Two labs reported 91.18-percent positivity rates. Such results suggest something rotten somewhere. Further investigation showed that many labs did not even report negative results. But when the TV journalists contacted the various labs to question the shocking numbers, data suspiciously changed. One lab, Orlando Health, had a 98 percent positivity rate. “However, when FOX 35 News contacted the hospital, they confirmed errors in the report. Orlando Health’s positivity rate is only 9.4 percent, not 98 percent as in the report.” Similarly, Orlando Veteran’s Medical Center had a positivity rate of 76 percent. “A spokesperson for the VA told FOX 35 News on Tuesday that this does not reflect their numbers and that the positivity rate for the center is actually 6 percent.” That is a huge difference. No surprise that COVID-19 “infections” showed an alarming rise in Florida in recent weeks. As of July 14 Florida state health officials had not replied to requests from the journalists for comment. Citing a dramatic rise in corona positive tested persons, California Democrat governor Gavin Newsome on July 14 reversed his decision to allow reopening of schools, offices, public malls and churches, though protest marches like Antifa or BLM are permitted, it seems. That decision in a state of 40 million and the largest state economy, will deal a severe blow to any USA economic recovery before November. Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom last month ordered that ballots be mailed to all of California’s 20.6 million voters for the Nov. 3 general election. Changed Narrative These cases indicate the huge, stinking miasma surrounding the entire subject of risk to the American population from SARS COV-2 and a political agenda that could have ominous consequences for the democratic process in America. The influential political forces backing the NIH guru Tony “trust science” Fauci– who has been consistently wrong in his advice, but always pushing the most draconian lockdowns and testing and vaccines–clearly are trying to continue the destructive lockdown until the November US elections. They seem willing to engage in any and every manipulation and panic promotion to do that. Now they have simply changed the narrative. Three months ago Fauci and others said the goal of the lockdowns and social distancing—something never before done in modern public health—was to “flatten the curve” of new coronavirus cases so hospitals would not be overloaded. That overload rarely happened. Now with hospitals nearly empty across the nation, the narrative has shifted to the meaningless number “new coronavirus cases,” which in fact mean new numbers tested with tests whose reliability has repeatedly been called “unsatisfactory” or worse. Stanford University’s Dr. John Ioannidis points out that the COVID-19 fatality rate for those under the age of 45 is “almost zero,” and between the ages of 45 and 70, it’s somewhere between 0.05% and 0.3%. So, the fact that young and middle-aged adults are testing positive in large numbers is not a warning sign of an impending onslaught of deaths, as the risk of death in these age groups is minuscule. The COVID19 Curve has been “flattened.” Politics is steering the USA COVID-19 events, but not the politics Fauci and the Governor of California claim. This could have catastrophic social and economic consequences if it continues.

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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years

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CNN: Born on the dark fringes of the internet, QAnon is now infiltrating mainstream American life and politics

By Paul P. Murphy, CNN

Fri July 3, 2020

(CNN) Since its origin three years ago, QAnon has festered in the darker corners of the internet. Now the group's followers, who call themselves "believers," have found a niche on social media and within the Republican Party.

QAnon began as a single conspiracy theory. But its followers now act more like a virtual cult, largely adoring and believing whatever disinformation the conspiracy community spins up.

Its main conspiracy theories claim dozens of politicians and A-list celebrities work in tandem with governments around the globe to engage in child sex abuse. Followers also believe there is a "deep state" effort to annihilate President Donald Trump.

But followers of the group have expanded from those beliefs and now allege baseless theories surrounding mass shootings and elections. Followers have falsely claimed that 5G cellular networks are spreading the coronavirus.

There's no evidence that any of what QAnon claims is factual.

FULL STORY:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/03/us/what-is-qanon-trnd/index.html

____________________________________________

Rolling Stone

It took years for the cracks to emerge for Jadeja, who slowly started to realize that Q drops were laden with logical inconsistencies. A turning point for him was a follower asking Q to get Trump to say the term “tippy top” as proof of Trump’s knowledge of the conspiracy; when Trump did say the phrase during a 2018 Easter egg roll speech, Q believers rejoiced, believing it to be confirmation that Q was real. Jadeja did some research and saw that Trump had said the phrase many times before. “That’s when I realized this was all a very slick con,” he says.

Former QAnon Followers Explain What Drew Them In — And Got Them Out

Like those leaving cults, some people who believe in conspiracy theories like QAnon and Pizzagate can break free from their beliefs

by EJ Dickson Sept 23, 2020 9:00AM ET

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ex-qanon-followers-cult-conspiracy-theory-pizzagate-1064076/

___________________________________________________

part 1 Psychology Today

The Psychological Needs That QAnon Feeds

Joe Pierre M.D. August 12, 2020

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202008/the-psychological-needs-qanon-feeds

____________________________________________

part 2 Psychology Today

How Far Down the QAnon Rabbit Hole Did Your Loved One Fall?

Joe Pierre M.D. August 21, 2020

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202008/how-far-down-the-qanon-rabbit-hole-did-your-loved-one-fall

____________________________________________

part 3 Psychology Today

What to do when someone you love becomes obsessed with QAnon

4 Keys to Help Someone Climb Out of the QAnon Rabbit Hole

Joe Pierre M.D. September 1, 2020

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/psych-unseen/202009/4-keys-help-someone-climb-out-the-qanon-rabbit-hole

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The thin line between conspiracy theories and cult worship is dissolving

An information war is being waged.

DEREK BERES 18 May, 2020 bigthink.com

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The Prophecies of Q

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.

The Atlantic June 2020 issue

Story by Adrienne LaFrance Illustrations by Arsh Raziuddin

This article is part of “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

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West Point

The QAnon Conspiracy Theory: A Security Threat in the Making?

July 2020

https://ctc.usma.edu/the-qanon-conspiracy-theory-a-security-threat-in-the-making/

____________________________________________

Why it’s important to see QAnon as a ‘hyper-real’ religion

May 28, 2020

https://religiondispatches.org/in-the-name-of-the-father-son-and-q-why-its-important-to-see-qanon-as-a-hyper-real-religion/

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The Birth of QAmom

Parenting influencers have embraced sex-trafficking conspiracy theories — and it’s taking QAnon from the internet into the streets

by EJ Dickson

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/qanon-mom-conspiracy-theory-parents-sex-trafficking-qamom-1048921/

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Christian Groups That Resist Public-Health Guidelines Are Forgetting a Key Part of the Religion’s History

#QAnon #cults

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myfriendpokey · 5 years

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easy like sunday morning

I know it sounds funny but I just can't stand the pain.. Given the volume of critical writing on difficult games in recent years isn't it time to talk about some easy ones? Everybody loves talking about, 'Sekiro', but no-one ever talks about, 'Felix The Cat (NES) (1992)', a delightful game with many levels that stands out in my childhood memory as being one of the very few games I was ever able to complete within the Xtravision rental window. In these notes I try to lay down a preliminary basis for felix the cat studies.[1]

1. Firstly what is easiness, is it a quality or the absence of a quality, of a texture? I'd like to focus here specifically NOT on games which deliberately avoid the idea of 'challenge' altogether (Proteus, etc) but instead on games where challenge is both theoretically present and totally perfunctory, where it's both possible to die, and just easier not to.

2. And the strange sense of waste that this creates - the waste in having something and not needing it, of having some productive capacity lie fallow. The dream is to always have both an affordance and something to flex it on, in perfect sync. There are situations where exercising some affordance might give a bad outcome (use sword on king to increase crime meter etc) but in general the universe is set up so that your acting, your being, your bodily striving has a useful and productive effect on the world at large – we hope, ha ha ha. We have no reason to doubt that we use our affordances, rather than that our affordances are using us. In an easy game this relationship becomes more uncanny - we get a sense of how an affordance can be baggage, a kind of painful excess of productive energy that comes with a vague, felt obligation to use it all up in some manner. The machine speaks through us just as much as if we were playing any bullet hell - but it does so less through an overload of stimulus than through lack of it, through opening a space, which the ambient noise of the body then rushes to fill. The aimless, stupid twitching of our flesh as it burns off all the energy which is socially and economically surplus to requirements is directed and made visible, jumping back and forth onscreen in the mocking form of a smiling platform cat, a form of automatic writing.

3. I'd actually like to avoid making a moral or political case for easy games as having some intrinsic social value (that they resist the 'investment' of skill mastery, that they undercut feelings of power and control, or that they indeed actually represent a new form of meta-difficulty in testing your ability to reject false measurements of success and artificial scarcity and that therefore playing Goldeneye with infinite ammo cheats on is praxis or something.[2]) These might be useful qualities at some moment or another - but I think they also show the strange, magic-eye effect, of trying to write about easiness in itself, writing about absence without just converting it into another kind of presence (I'm sure I have failed multiple times and will fail multiple more). So easiness in videogames is constantly at risk of becoming just a different kind of difficulty, or some form of symbolic content - rather than the lack of such difficulty, or the lack of such content... In the context of videogames, a new media form busily involved with stockpiling content and meanings and symbolism and justification of all kinds, in trying to fill itself up and out, the idea of their emptiness is somehow quite threatening.[3]

4. Difficulty in games tends to be framed as a challenge to the primacy of the self, or as an estrangement, something that pushes you out of your comfort zone. It wakes you up, makes you more alert. Easiness by comparison is a sop to the self - indulgent, a narrowing of horizons. Easiness is mainstream, difficulty is avant-garde - and discussions of difficulty in games tend to draw a lot upon comparisons to older avant-garde art or literature. I'm in favour of avant-garde videogames but i think part of claiming that tradition should be a willingness to critique it, too. For example, difficult games are some of the most popular ones to stream - are these challenging the self? To an extent they allow the performance of the self, as manifested in angry outbursts, "reacting" in some characteristic manner, individuating oneself through accomplishment or distinctive playstyle, demonstrating personal qualities such as persistence and strength of will, very little of which could be said to come through in your average Felix The Cat longplay. And while Marvel movies and longrunning tv shows are seldom difficult in the same way as experimental art they do at least tend to gesture at the idea and feeling of a certain difficulty, an emotional strenuousness, a conflict to overcome. We don't just get a whole movie of Spiderman trying on 100 different hats. Some kind of difficulty is prized in both cultures, with the difference being that of location and degree. The idea of the modernist shock, the abrupt estrangement that jolts the (presumably bourgeois, etc) viewer out of their habitual comfort zone, sits awkwardly against comparatively more recent concepts like Naomi Klein's idea of the “shock doctrine” or Paul Virilio's writings on the bombarded, exhausted viewer - or indeed with that most modern form: the hot take, the truly gratuitous and combative opinion, tossed at the unsuspecting for the sake of wreaking minor carnage. The succession of shocks here don't so much disturb the self as confirm it as a thing apart, defined in negative against the tumult outside and valued as a refuge from that outside. Maybe we take it to the gym now and then, we test it out upon some pre-selected object of difficulty to keep it in shape, but afterwards the gate goes down and the wall goes up. I don't think difficulty is bad or illegitimate but if psychic reconfiguration is the goal then how about a modernist slackening instead? In the vein of Stein, Pessoa, Walser, Musil - "the game without qualities". Lured into roaming outside of its protective carapace the brain starts to dissolve, sprawl, melt into gloop, be devoured by ants.

5. Experience of playing an easy game: there’s no pushback, there's no skill check , a string of easy victories lead you forward without realising, or leads a part of you forward, there's no moment where you have to pull yourself together and decide just how much more of your time you wanna spend on this thing, a chirpy character onscreen is declaiming "GREAT!" and "SUBURB!" as you shoot pellets at more enemies, whatever aimless drive or impulse you flicked toward this thing to test it has not yet slowed down or returned, it's like dropping a pebble down a well, and waiting for the sound, and waiting forever - and then there's a plop! and whatever the process was, it's finished, you blink, try to remember what you were doing, wander off, still adjusting to the light.

6. The history of aesthetics is that of converting new kinds of necessity into new kinds of virtue [4]. Difficulty is a virtue in videogames, but it started out as a necessity, as well - as a prefab form handed down from the old mechanical amusements, a way to aestheticise (and commercialise) material resistance at a time when material resistance was almost all that videogames had to offer[5]. As certain kinds of difficulty emerge as objects of attention a reversal takes place: instead of difficulty being a way to engage with videogames, videogames become a way to engage with a certain kind of difficulty. Difficulty becomes a sign that unites a diffuse and heterogenuous field of garish electronic debris into a single medium and an aesthetic – this becomes part of what videogames *are*, and persists even when the original reasons for that difficulty become less and less present, and as 'difficulty' comes to exist mainly as a set of inherited structures and modes of representation (health bar, life counter etc). To make something that looks like a videogame in every way but has no difficulty is in a way to re-historicise it, to cut the thread which holds all the parts together - now the game collapses into a set of disembodied effects, sounds, gestures, machinery, which exist not so much as the expression of an aesthetic as an expression of the material history behind that aesthetic. The easy game is not a game but a kind of game-byproduct, an industrial accident that gives clue to the inner workings of the machine.

7. The mysterious purgatory that is the solved or near-solved state of a videogame, aimless and uncanny, an image of fulfilled desire: maybe not your desire, but somebody's, or some part of you. Think of playing with cheat codes: a few minutes ago you might have been desperate to get BLUE SWORD [RARE], now you can't get rid of the things. A routine complaint in popular longform games is that people just end up getting too much money and not having enough endless pits to dump it all into (thorstein veblen real??). And this is a known thing and trite to even remark upon and usually the point where the discussion turns into pop-psychology liturgy of how the human brain is "broken" and "hard-wired" to need new challenges and etc. I don't care, I'd like to spend more time within this twilight area, to construct as diligent and thorough a map of its empty rooms and blockages and tiny, shifting, hypersubtle moments of enjoyment or deep melancholy as the one we already have for Diablo clones and similar. I think here of stuff like EJ Gold's games which claim to depict (indeed, allow you to perform rituals within) the bardo realms waiting after this world, where you roll around endless corridors collecting icons to accumulate money and charisma for your next life, and where for some reason there's a button to fire out pellets despite there being no enemies to kill. Videogames are depressingly, predictably excellent at producing new manifestations of inferno; I think, for the same reasons, that they could produce some very interesting paradises as well.

Is Felix The Cat a good game? Or is it in fact the only game, and also i'm dead and my spirit has been trapped inside of it? I hope the above comments make my feelings known. All i can do from here is recommend you watch Docfuture's Sonic Easy Mode video, and contemplate the world that could have been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ef8SD9gUg

[1] Just imagine it - instead of endless essays on "how completing, not completing, not playing VIDEOGAME made me a better person, worse person, more divorced person delete as appropriate" we would instead get endless essays on "how playing VIDEOGAME left me more or less the same person, I suppose, I don't really remember. But I did like the beach level".

[2] Having said this I of course realise that this is totally inevitable and look forward to BABYMODECORE, the videogame movement for people who always instinctively pick the lowest difficulty setting and want to reclaim such powerful formative experiences as beating up on the test dummy character in Tekken (and being scared that one day he'd glitch out and hunt me down instead)

[3] I wonder if part of the hatred for "asset flips" that they just replicate the shape of a videogame without filling it up with justificatory content, abstracting it somehow.

[4] Mangled from a line in F. Jameson's "Marxism and Form"

[5] Like early digital forms of old mechanical arm wrestling machines and punching bags - which slowly became part of that mysterious stock repository of ancestral videogame dream imagery, the minigame collection.

#felix the cat #easy games #commodores 64

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jackshithere · 5 years

Text

Till and Schneider in an interview with the "Stern"

source

They sing about child abuse, incest, necrophilia. In a video they show excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl's body-cult Olympia movie. And when singer Till Lindemann rolls the R, it roars out of the speakers as it once did from the Volksempfänger. The Wall Street Journal stated, "Woah, that's German!" Rammstein, a german band. A [politically] right band? Since its founding in early 1994, the six musicians from Schwerin and East Berlin are suspected of doing right-wing rock.

In fact, the lyrics with their portrayals of sex and violence are often close to censorship - but fascism is not even between the lines. Now Rammstein, with around three million albums sold, the internationally most successful German-language band since Kraftwerk end of the 70s, a new CD on the market: "Mutter" is by pre-orders even before the release on 2 April for the top 3 of the German charts written down.

The 'Stern' spoke with singer Till Lindemann and drummer Christoph Schneider about their youth in the GDR, Rammstein as a therapy - and provocation as a stylistic device.

On your new album you have underlined the title "Left 234" with the sound of marching boots. That sounds like the newsreel 60 years ago.

Schneider: The piece was the first attempt by Rammstein to deal artistically with the eternal reproach that we are a right-wing band. It's almost funny that this will cause some discussion again.

But you could have omitted the marching sound. Would not the message that your heart seems to be "leftist" be less clear then?

Till: That's the intention. One lets something march and then answers.

Schneider: We hate to express ourselves clearly. Rammstein always has room for interpretation.

That makes for misunderstandings.

Till: That was right from the start. We all grew up in the GDR, come from the punk scene. If we wanted to perform there, we had to present our repertoire before the so-called rating commission. Of course, you had to think very carefully about what you say, what you sing and sometimes how you play. Any criticism of the system was prohibited. So you had to try and make a loop. That's probably why it's still within us that we like to respond ambiguously.

Schneider: When you look at lyrics from GDR bands, you can see how good they are in part when they rewrite a subject with lyrical means. This past is closely connected with us. We can not get away from it. That was our youth. If we came from the west, Rammstein would not exist. At any rate, we would not be so violent.

Why not?

Till: What do you want to do to get you to play in front of more than ten people? You start using provocative means and being extreme. There we were certainly more courageous than East Germans. It started when we sang that kind of hard music in German. And then something has also unloaded what had accumulated in our GDR youth, because we have reacted abreacted. Finally we were allowed to say everything, do everything. Basically it was quite simple: look into your stomach, look into your soul, and start making music.

Out of your seemingly very dark soul came out lines like:

"My black blood and your white flesh / I'm getting hornier from your shrieks". [Mein schwarzes Blut und dein weißes Fleisch ich werd immer geiler von deinem Gekreisch]

Was that more than a provocation?

Schneider: The provocation is exhausted at some point. There are only a few topics that are good for it. We used them up.

Till: What's the use of writing the same kids fuck song for the third time?

Schneider: We started with the tank at that time, regardless of left or right or losses, and we broke through. We have been heard. Now we're going to deal with the pieces left over. And start to realize what we really are - a German metal band. With the new album we often asked ourselves: Is that still Rammstein? Are we starting to make only beautiful music? So far, the new record is no longer provocative. That's certainly mainstream. But good mainstream.

The provocation of Rammstein is not only based on the ambiguous texts, but also on the aesthetics of the band and their show. Military headlights [basically Batman signal thingy] shining in the sky are evoking images of Nazi Nazi party rallies; Lindemann's throaty chant reminds us of the rolled-up R Nazi sizes. Does it have to be that way?

Till: The R comes on its own. When I sing so deeply and expressively, my vocal cord flutters, and then it just rolls. By the way: Peter Maffay's vocal cord reacts similarly, but also rolls the R. And the light dome, which looks good, right? It's not about more. Just because it's associated with those twelve crappy years, should not that be allowed anymore? Then tear down the Olympic Stadium and all the other Nazi buildings in Berlin! This is twelve years that this idiot named Hitler has on his conscience, and again and again one comes back to it. It's about art. There is no relationship between one and the other.

Schneider: This discussion shows that there seems to be no coping with the past in society. You can say: Okay, there is the light dome, I think that's good, and there's the Reich Party Rally, I think that's shit. You can separate that, everyone for yourself. Only in this way can one find the way to one's own history. I can not always think, oh, it's all so loaded, I can not talk about it, and the others could think ... No, open dispute! The task of Rammstein is also the search for an independent music, a German music. Of course, we come across our story and get all these allegations. But I see that rather positively: We try to find our own identity, which many musicians or artists in Germany have given up long ago.

This also means that you show no emotion on stage and Lindemann beats his head bloody with the microphone?

Till: We're actors on stage, that's show. You do not notice the pain when you hit the same spot every night on the head. Schneider has even received a broken neon tube in the shoulder. Paul, our guitarist, burned my ear in Australia now.

Schneider: It's probably like this: Rammstein is like a self-help group for us. Like a therapy.

When did you first learn about the era of National Socialism?

Till: We grew up with Auschwitz. With us was the everyday life: group travel with the school to the camps, see Buchenwald, flowers lie down at monuments, join the concentration camp march through Mecklenburg, to Güstrow along the highway. There are such monuments on every corner.

Schneider: In the GDR civics and history lessons were strongly antifascist-colored. Everything except communism was evil: fascism, West Germany, capitalism. These were all taboos. I think that's why we now have this pronounced right-wing extremism in the East: I'm shit, and I want to draw attention to myself. So I use the worst of what I know - and become a neo-Nazi.

Why do not you participate in concerts like "Rock against right-wing violence"?

Schneider: We do not want to be tense with these carts. That would be ridiculous. Then it is said that we used it only to become even more popular. Besides, what's the use? The right ones are there. They are part of our population. We have to accept this problem and finally accept that there are these tendencies in Germany. It does not help to always exclude the right. We have to talk to those who solve their problems.

Rammstein reaches the Far right scene.

Till: We reach many, including the advertisers in Hamburg. And as far as the right is concerned, for me the state is too soft-spoken about the problem. You have a black half-dead, and there are construction hours as punishment. We used to beat ourselves with skins even before the turnaround in Schwerin - why do not you go through harder today? I grew up with a girl who is a mulatto. She still visits Mecklenburg every summer. She is afraid of people and does not dare to go to certain places. I'm just ashamed of that.

Nevertheless, you play with a Germany image that evokes certain memories.

Schneider:DRammstein is not a concept. We've come together to do this music and show, and we work like a support group. We do what we like well, nothing more. Maybe that's why our fans think we are authentic. Following the motto: Rammstein do their thing and are not like the others. This may also explain our success in the US. But with that our critics get a problem again: They fear that the American kids will not associate with Germany any more than Rammstein. The Americans are really only on our artistic skills. This is politically overrated.

Till: One does not ask Ricky Martin which political attitude he has. You listen to a song, find it good or bad. That's all.

#Rammstein #long post

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